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festivals 2016

A 24-Hour Portrait of a Man at Glastonbury

We followed the same guy around the festival with a camera for 24 hours to document his search for hedonistic enlightenment. Here's what happened...

This article was originally published on Noisey UK

Everyone goes to music festivals to pursue the dream of achieving an experience. That’s an abstract term, but at its core, it means subjugating one’s being to changing weather conditions, fluctuating mental states, and unhygienic long-drops in an effort to achieve something that appeals to humanity’s deeply-rooted desire for utopia. Without the day-to-day obligations to be anywhere at a specific time or perform any mundane tasks, you have the free reign to spiritually align your chakras with the depraved sensibility of Moff from Human Traffic.

Annoncering

Since the dawn of time all the way through to DJ Khaled's Snapchat presence, we’ve delighted in watching people attempt to pursue these moments of enlightenment. We want to see their facial expressions, the way their draw drops when the sun rises, and the moment when their brain caves in on itself under the weight of being awake for longer than it is used to. Of course, we’ve been through these experiences ourselves. We’ve seen other people go through them, too. But our memory of them is limited—like brief snippits of regrettable texts and conversations that flash through our consciousness when we try to remember what happened the night before.

So, in order to document the colorful portrait of these drunken pursuits, we decided to follow someone around at Glastonbury with a camera for a full 24 hours. Throughout that time, they strived to achieve some sort of experience and came back with a story that frames the narrative of a young person who has been blinded by his desire to find a life better than the one he owns. Through photos taken hourly—from 8 AM on the Thursday through until 8 AM on the Friday—here’s what happened.

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