Before every show on Harry Styles’ Together, Together tour, a story goes live on the tour’s Instagram account linking to a Google Form with a surprisingly simple series of questions: What is your name? What are your social media handles? Do you have tickets to tonight’s show?
Selected fans are declared fan photographers for the evening and tasked with capturing the gig. As a thank you, they receive a Munsell purple tote of goodies including a black hat with a block-print pun on the Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally album title (“Photographer, Occasionally”), a branded CATCH film camera, and a hoodie with swirly, colourful caps.
For many, the email comes as a complete surprise. Wiktoria, who was selected as a fan photographer for the Wembley Stadium show on 13 June, recalls: “I was speechless. I stared at my phone screen and thought it was a scam. How the hell did they pick me when so many people applied? There’s only two or three photographers per show.”
After the concert, as Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “Souvenir” blares out the stadium speakers, the cameras are collected by a tour representative, the film is developed, and the photos are uploaded to the @togethertogether Instagram account.
Yet Harry Styles doesn’t feature in these images at all.
Instead you’ll find: girls in tiered, sequined skirts with ties swooped around necks like little scarves; a line of young women lying on a stadium floor, chins tipped upwards, tired and defiant; an elderly man clutching a bright red handkerchief in his shirt pocket; whiskey shots held in outstretched hands, scrunchies, friendship bracelets, and pit wristbands visible on a circle of wrists.
Jess, a fan photographer for the Wembley Stadium show on 20 June, recalls: “Before the show started, I was feeling anxious because I felt pressure to take perfect pictures. Once the show started though, I realised that I just wanted to capture the most genuine possible feeling of being in the middle of the crowd at a Harry show.”
The more time I spent scrolling through @togethertogether, the clearer it became that these photographs aren’t really about Harry at all. They’re about the people who have built a world around him. Something about the way they looked at fandom felt different, and I wanted to understand why.
In a 2023 opinion piece for Rolling Stone Australia, aptly titled “Why Do We Hate Young Female Fandom,” writer Bianca O’Neill writes: “It’s perfectly normal for a man to cosplay in another man’s jersey, or paint their face in their team’s colours, but if women dress up for a Harry Styles concert, it’s reported on by the news as some kind of oddity. Is it not the same thing? A passion for what they love?”
Three years later, the tendency to pathologise things liked by an audience composed primarily of young women – to reduce their interests to needless obsession – has remained. A quick Google search while writing this article revealed top results with titles like “Harry Styles MANIA” or commentary invoking teenage hysteria. Wiktoria puts it more simply: “I think people just see us as silly little fangirls and don’t really understand how important he and his music is to us, how excited and happy we are to see him.”
At risk of sounding like an art history bro, there is a reason John Berger’s famous observation that “men act and women appear” still feels relevant here. Women have long been positioned as objects to be looked at, rather than the people doing the looking. Coverage of predominantly female fandom often follows the same script. Screaming girls are gawked at in the press and called manic or hysterical. Together, Together lets fan photographers invert that arrangement, at least for one night. They’re not there to be looked at, but to do the looking, and what they choose to photograph isn’t Harry so much as one another.
Jess continues: “I remember a girl near me crying during ‘Fine Line,’ and another girl – a complete stranger – went up to her, started hugging her and wiping her tears without saying a word. It was such a pure moment that perfectly embodies the community created in Harry spaces.”
Perhaps that is because fandom has always been as much about one another as it is about the celebrity. Concerts function like third spaces: not home, not quite public life, but somewhere in between. They have their own social norms, inside jokes, and rituals (in this case square dances, sneaky shots of liquor, and coordinated wardrobes).
Together, Together has made photography part of that ritual, too. Through its fan photographers, it has built a fanmade community archive: proof that this place existed, that you belonged there, and that someone else, somewhere, belongs there too.
Strip away years of “Treat People With Kindness” merch, pastel feather boas, and homemade Dance With All Your Friends memorabilia, and who knows what you’d be left with. The community didn’t spring up despite Harry. It was created with him – at times impossible, in its shared history and visual culture, to disentangle who has served as the inspiration for whom.
Ask any one of the dozens of people I talked to the night I attended my own Together, Together show, and they will say some variation of what Wiktoria told me:
“The most special thing about being in [Harry’s] fandom is how open his fans are, regardless of whether we know each other or not.”
In a world all too quick to write off what young women love as mania, there feels like something subversive about a predominantly female audience tipping the gaze inward – knowing that lurking just a few inches out of frame is the world’s most glittery pop star, but choosing instead to capture the community built around him. That community is in charge, at last, of how its fandom is portrayed.
