Photo Credit: © Simon Høgsberg From Høgsberg's project, “We're All Gonna Die—100 meters of existence.” The 100 x 78 cm image includes 178 people, shot by Høgsberg from the same spot on a railroad bridge on Warschauer Strasse in Berlin over a 20-day period in the summer of 2007.

For 20 consecutive days in the summer of 2007, Simon Høgsberg stationed himself in one spot along a pedestrian walkway over a Berlin train station and photographed thousands of passers-by from a low angle with a 400 mm lens. The project was a continuation of Høgsberg's study of the common experience of urban humanity. But instead of presenting his images as a series of individual portraits, Høgsberg stitched dozens of the images side-by-side into one very long group portrait he titled "We're All Gonna Die—100 meters of existence."

The image is deceptively simple and graphically clean, showing individuals and sporadic clusters of people across its length against a neutral background. "That was what I was aiming at—to make an image that was beautifully light to look at, like Japanese art, but also chaotic," Høgsberg says. It took him nearly three months of painstaking work to construct the portrait after he finished shooting the images.

Photo Credit: © Simon Høgsberg More views from the “We're All Gonna Die” group portrait.

The project ended a creative lull for Høgsberg. He recalls describing a sense of restlessness to his girlfriend while they were at a public pool in Copenhagen, where he lives. Høgsberg had an urge to write a novel, so his girlfriend encouraged him to go do it. Høgsberg promptly holed up in the Berlin flat of one of his friends to start writing.

He sat at the desk for ten days, "and did some pretty decent work," he says. "Then I got sick of sitting inside a concrete cube in a city that was unexplored, so I started going on these long walks."

Høgsberg happened upon the pedestrian overpass, which had a lot of foot traffic because there was a railroad station beneath it. "I had my camera with me, and a newly bought 400mm lens, and when I started shooting those hundreds of people that were coming towards me, I instantly felt the same love for the sum of these people as I did when sitting on Oxford Street in London, working on the 'Private and Public' project."

The Private and Public project was Høgsberg's first man-on-the street study, which he started in early summer of 2001 as a photography student in London, and completed in late spring 2002. Høgsberg had set his camera up in the exact same spot each time, photographing people who happened to walk into the frame of the camera.

The project was a study of the private hardships that Londoners try to hide behind their stoic facades. "People were trying hard to reflect feelings that they didn't necessarily have. It was apparent to me that people—especially people walking alone—seemed very affected by the hardship that you experience in a city where rent is so high and salaries are so very low…I guess I wanted to show that I was in the same boat, and I understood the gravity of being an individual in a city that was full of other individuals who really didn't have the energy to deal with your problems."

What worried Høgsberg when he began photographing passers-by on the Berlin overpass six years later was that he was repeating himself. But he'd shot the first few Berlin images from a crouching position, with a neutral sky as a background. Inspired by the panoramas of people by his friend Peter Funch, another Danish photographer, Høgsberg lined up the first few Berlin images side by side. Funch, too, had shot his photos from a crouching position against a neutral sky, and the juxtaposition "looked fantastic," Høgsberg says. The faces, clothes and hairstyles of the subjects struck him as distinctly German.