One coat, one shadow: shooting Concrete Season

The brief from the magazine was eight pages, one coat, one location. The location was a building that did not exist yet: a concrete shell by the harbour, no glass in the windows, no heating, a stair that ended in air.

We arrived at eight. The sun did not reach the wall until nine-forty, and then only through one gap. I had walked the building the week before with a phone and a compass, and the whole shoot was built around that gap: twenty minutes of hard side light, a wall bare enough to take a shadow as clean as a drawing.

What I carried

Very little. One camera, one lens, a small reflector I never used. When the light is that hard, you stop adding things and start removing them. The stylist brought three coats; we shot one.

What we did

We did not direct the model into poses. We gave her a path across the floor and asked her to walk it, slowly, again and again. I stood in a fixed spot and waited for the moment the shadow and the body separated on the wall.

The best frame of the day was the one where nobody was doing anything.

The edit

Of 412 frames, the magazine took nine. I printed the rest as a contact sheet and drew a red circle around the ones I could not stop looking at. Three of them were not in the magazine. You can see two of them in the series.