For a decade, Jose Antonio Rosas has photographed from deep inside the crowds at some of the world's great gatherings. From music festivals and religious pilgrimages to cultural rites, he found a common impulse: the desire to step outside everyday life and experience a sense of connection and release. In 2015, standing in a crowd at Glastonbury Festival, Jose Antonio Rosas experienced a sense of collective euphoria that stayed with him. Over the next ten years, he followed this feeling across four continents, photographing seven of the world's great gatherings-from the explosion of colour at India's Holi, the candlelit devotion of Christmas in Lalibela, the vibrant dances of Peru's Candelaria, the icy pilgrimage to Qoyllur Rit'i in the Andes, the vast human tide of Kumbh Mela and the unrestrained joy of Brazil's Carnaval. Though separated by culture, geography and purpose, these gatherings share a powerful common thread: the suspension of ordinary life and the collective release of uninhibited emotion. Within the press of bodies and the roar of music or prayer, individuality does not disappear, it transforms. Closed eyes, open mouths and gestures of serenity or ecstasy become expressions of freedom, connection and transcendence. Somewhere We Feel Free moves across cultures, faiths and continents, revealing the shared human impulse to gather, to surrender and, somewhere within the crowd, to feel free. With an essay by art critic Jean Dykstra and an interview with Jose Antonio Rosas by artist Janelle Lynch, the publication brings together this powerful decade-long body of work in the photographer's second monograph.
