My year captured in one scene wasn’t on a stage or a screen. It was on that grassy slope in Manchester watching thousands of ticketless people belt out songs, without even being at the gig. Gallagher Hill at Heaton Park saw a mass of ordinary people of all ages and accents, pressed together in a northern sunset, singing like a communion.
I loved that no algorithm decided which were the right moments to serve up even as this became the most-seen stuff of the summer. These memories were made of low-fi magic – people swapping cans, passing phones to strangers for a photo.
For me, culture isn’t something you scroll, it’s something that happens sometimes beautifully and spontaneously when people gather and hold the same thing at the same time. And in a year thick with talk of AI algorithms and the sense that everything is being engineered into a frictionless drip I love that these bits still cut through.
James Kirkham is the founder of Iconic.
