Free Luigi Mangione documents the crowd gathered outside federal court as supporters, critics, journalists, livestreamers and onlookers competed to define the event. Chants, masks, costumes, signs and an effigy turned the courthouse steps into a stage.
The pictures track how a defendant becomes a public symbol before the legal process can contain his meaning. To some, Mangione appeared as a target of state power. To others, he became a villain, celebrity or surface for anger at institutions. The crowd did not form one public but several overlapping and opposing ones.
The series keeps those contradictions visible without endorsing a verdict or reducing participants to caricature. It asks how legal proceedings are transformed by spectacle, and how cameras, props and performance shape what the public believes it is witnessing.
