Standing in front of this expanse of labour, bodies reduced to indistinguishable and interchangeable shapes and colour, I was gripped by the same panic and confusion that caused me to look up “person” in the dictionary the day after 9/11. If “person” was defined as “a human being regarded as an individual” and “individual” was defined as “a single human being as distinct from a group,” then my personhood was only legible in relation to how I differed from others. As a boy I would scan images of crowds — military formations; synchronized displays in stadiums; the praying, prostrate pilgrims in Mecca or St. Peter’s Square — trying to pick out a person inside the mass. In magazines or newspapers, on television or the Internet, whenever I saw large-group scenes I would try to find a person looking out from the crowd towards the photographer as if saying, “I am here.”

Growing up I had an inexplicable terror of being lost in a mass. Not lost in a geographic sense but subsumed into a crowd such that I, the person that was me, would never emerge again. And not the diffuse crowds of shopping malls or parks but organized ones. Ones asked to stand for the national anthem in an arena or recite the Scout’s honour in unison or perform a synchronized routine for a school assembly. These bodies packed together, unified, became a kind of corpse. Corps, an organized body of people. And I experienced each of these corps as a kind of death.