Commission — 001
Editorial
Shopfront
Client
Nightshift Magazine
Category
Editorial
Year
2024
16×20 Fujiflex · C-type · edition of twelve
Nightshift — a magazine wanted the street, and got the person standing in it
The photograph — 002
The frame that ran
16×20 Fujiflex · C-type · edition of twelve
The brief — 003
Nightshift Magazine
Nightshift wanted the street. Six spreads on a city after the last train, and a brief that said atmospheric twice in four lines. What a magazine means by atmospheric is usually empty pavement and a wet reflection, and that is a photograph anyone can make on the way home with a phone.
We took the commission on one condition: that the pictures could contain people. A street after midnight is not empty, it is staffed — by the person locking up, the person waiting, the person who has nowhere in particular to be. The atmosphere the editor wanted is made by them, not by the absence of them. The condition was agreed in one email and never discussed again, which is usually how you can tell a brief was written by somebody who has not thought about it very hard.
Frames — as shot
Frames as shot
Frame 04 · f/8 · 5s · the eleventh night
Frame 11 · two who waited for the exposure to finish
The approach — 004
How it was made
Eleven nights between October and December, always the same three hours, always the same two streets. Colour negative at box speed, no flash, nothing brought in that the street did not already have. A shopfront running its lights for nobody is a five-second exposure at f/8, which means the person in front of it has to be someone willing to stand still for five seconds while a stranger points a camera at them.
Most of them were. Asking is the whole method: the frames that work are the ones where somebody agreed, and you can see the agreement in the picture — a person who has said yes stands differently from a person who has not been asked. The ones taken without asking are all in the second box, and that box has never been opened for a client. Sixty-two frames were made across the eleven nights. Nine were shown to the magazine. The filtration was dialled once, on the third night, and never touched again, because a set of pictures that were graded differently from each other is a set of pictures, not a story.
Frame — full width
One frame, full width
Frame 19 · he asked what it was for, then crossed anyway
Frames — the rest of the roll
What did not run
Frame 23 · shot in daylight, filed with the night work
Frame 31 · not commissioned, kept anyway
The outcome — 005
2024
Six pages ran, one of them a full bleed the editor had not asked for and took anyway. The frame on the cover is the fourth exposure of the eleventh night and the only one where the subject is looking back down the lens — which was not planned, and is the reason it is the cover.
The prints went out in January, ten weeks after the last night of shooting. Nothing here was printed the same week it was made. Two of the people in these photographs asked for a copy and were sent one; that is not part of the fee and it is not negotiable either. The edition is open at nine of twelve.
The print — 006
Editions close at twelve
Specification
16×20 Fujiflex · C-type · edition of twelve
Process
Chromogenic C-type, RA-4, printed wet
Turnaround
Ten to twelve weeks from the last exposure
Signed
On the verso, numbered, with the negative reference
