When online groups meet up in real life - captured by a photograher

Whether you're into Game of Thrones or experimental knitting, you are almost guaranteed to find people who share our not-so idiosyncratic tastes online. And every once in a while, these close-knit groups emerge from behind their keyboards and to meet in real life.

It is these interactions that New York-based photographer Amy Lombard has been capturing for almost half a decade. Couch surfers, stay-at-home dads with baby strapped to their chests, freegans who live of discarded food, Harry Potter enthusiasts, Chihuahua fans, red heads, and the 'Reno Women of a Certain Age' group have all been captured by Lombard.

“Now more than ever because of the Internet it's a choice to be alone,” she tells The Independent. Anyone who has ever felt a pang of isolation, Lombard suggests, can empathise with the people in her work. Growing up, the Internet was her way to escape the drudgery of school and make friends. In 2013, with a grant from photography platform VSCO, she was able to document groups with very different tastes but with the same goal: to connect and feel a part of something bigger than themselves. The images were later made into the book Connected.

Still, Lombard stresses that every group was "very different". For some, online groups can help them understand the most intimate parts of their personalities.

"In particular for groups like the aces, or asexuals, the understanding and rise of people coming out as asexual is directly related to the Internet groups that first started developing in the early 2000s," explains Lombard. "For one group member, she came to understand her sexuality through a viral reblog on Tumblr."

But it's not always so serious. "I think one of the most memorable meetups was the very first one,” she recalls. “It was a pug meetup in Staten Island. I had been drawn to this group because I had seen a corgi beach meetup in Southern California. When I saw the photos, mostly bad phone photos, I just felt like this could have been photographed in a more interesting way.

“I wondered if there was something similar on the East Coast. Amazingly enough, just a few days later the Staten Island pug meetup was hosting their annual pool party. There was pug decorations, a pug shaped cake, and thirty pugs and their owners in the background of the organiser's home.”

Another of her favourite shoots involved barefoot hikers in Eastern Massachusetts.

“I am not the ‘nature type’. I live in New York for a reason,” says Lombard. “The barefoot lifestyle is a very interesting one that people don't understand. The organiser who started it was almost on disability because his back was so bad. The doctors had no idea what was wrong with him, and after taking to the internet he found people who had similar problems that decided to give up shoes to help alleviate the problem. It turns out that was the culprit. He now tries to educate people about the barefoot lifestyle through this group.

Recounting how she braved an outing the group, she goes on: "The hike took place after a really crazy rain storm, and we hiked for about three to four miles in the mud. It was such an amazing feeling. I never would have done it had it not been for this group, but I'm definitely going on more barefoot hikes.”

But the group that beats them all, she says, was the The Group That Shall Not Be Named of Harry Potter fanatics, named after the byword for the book's villain Voldemort.

“This is not a group filled with kids, it's a bunch of adults ranging from people in their 20s to their late 60s. For a group of adults to be able to see magic in the everyday is just really wonderful to be around.”

"What these groups have in common is that they all yearn for a sense of community,” concludes Lombard. “These are things that are important to them, and they have a desire to share it with others.” And Harry Potter fanatic or otherwise, that’s a feeling we can all relate to.