As it's somehow my 7th year shooting Comic Con, I've started to notice what elements come and go and what seems to always stay the same. On a superficial level, certain fandoms are starting to reveal surprisingly short shelf lives (almost no Game of Thrones this year), while others are always there and plentiful, like Jokers and Harley Quinn, in every form imaginable. Far and away the most popular costume this year was the Scoops Ahoy uniform from Stranger Things Season 3, which I feel like is a strictly 2019 phenomena.
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On a deeper level, I feel like the essence of the event hasn't really changed at all. It's a very contemporary intersection of obsession, commerce, fantasy, and community. As a photographer, it's a dizzying spectacle, literal visual chaos, where there are hundreds of possibilities in front of you at any given moment. I find myself literally chasing down pictures, barely able to make sense of what's happening in front of me.As the years have gone on, I've become more interested in making pictures that create a narrative abstractness, reforming the disparate elements of all of these brands and intellectual properties and fans and logos and products to create something strange, beautiful, and new.All photographs by Michael Marcelle. You can follow his work here.
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