Digital library applications require very general object recog- nition techniques. We describe an object recognition strategy that op- erates by grouping together image primitives in increasingly distinctive collections. Once a sufficiently large group has been found, we declare that an object is present. We demonstrate this method on applications such as finding unclothed people in general images and finding horses in general images. Finding clothed people is difficult, because the vari- ation in colour and texture on the surface of clothing means that it is hard to find regions of clothing in the image. We show that our strategy can be used to find clothing by marking the distinctive shading patterns associated with folds in clothing, and then grouping these patterns.