Photographic Series ‘Hobby Buddies’ by Ursula Sprecher & Andi Cortellini. (Yellowtrace)

Camping and Caravanning Club.

Dintefisch Diving Club.

Hat Club.

Merriment Pipe-Smokers’ Club.

St. Brandan Scout Section.

Butchers’ Friends Society.

Star Wars Club.

What do you do when you find a group of people who share the same wacky interests and strange hobbies as you? You start a club, of course! In the series ‘Hobby Buddies’, photographers Ursula Sprecher and Andi Cortellini have captured a wide range of gatherings of like-minded people completely in their element. Over the past seven years, they’ve visited numerous groups of people that gather for a shared leisure activity and photographed them all in bizarre yet strangely interesting staged portraits. Sprecher and Cortellini say that the images are dedicated to the “joy of pursuing a common cause or shared idea.”

The amazing series of 60 photographs have now all been published in their book ‘Hobby Buddies.’ These carefully staged compositions show real people from all manner of clubs and organisations whose volunteer members are bound by common interests. Each photograph took about four hours to produce, and involved building a scenery and setting up studio lights around it. For Sprecher, who had long had the idea for the project, working with the hobbyists was mutually inspiring. “We always felt like guests in their passion, and they were guests in our work,” she said. “Some people do something and spend time on their interest for many years. It’s very serious to work on something for that long.”