1
Photographer
One per assignment. A second camera changes how a room behaves.
Assignments · Five weeks, minimum
One photographer.One lens.No shot list.
The same shape of commission every time. The only thing that changes from one assignment to the next is what the photographer found once nobody was watching them.
Commission usFive weeks is long enough to stop being news.
A day rate buys a photograph of an event. That is a real thing to want, and there are agencies built for it; we are not one of them.
What five weeks buys is the third visit. The one where the door is already open, nobody straightens the room, and the picture is of the place rather than of a photographer being shown around it.
It is slower, it costs more, and about a third of what we file could not have been made any other way.
The five weeks, in order
4,860 frames in total
- Week one
- Arriving. The photographer is a stranger with a camera and everybody behaves like it. 780 frames, and none of them are why we came.
- Week two
- Being tolerated. The same faces, the same route, at the same hour. Nothing is filed and nothing is asked for. 820 frames.
- Week three
- Being ignored, which is the whole point of the five weeks. The first frames from inside. 960 frames, 260 of them from inside.
- Week four
- Inside. The work that the commission was actually for, mostly made in rooms we were not allowed into in week one. 1,040 frames, 420 from inside.
- Week five
- Leaving, and the second pass: the frame that was missed, shot properly. 1,260 frames, 640 of them from inside.
What an assignment is made of
35
Millimetres
One lens for the whole assignment. Chosen before departure, not swapped.
4,860
Frames
On a five-week commission, of which 1,320 are made from inside.
What we agree to, and what we do not
- No shot list
- We will not accept a list of pictures to reproduce. Tell us what you want to understand and the photographer will tell you what is there.
- Nothing staged
- Nobody is asked to move, repeat an action or look at the camera. If a frame needed arranging, it is not filed.
- Captions
- Every frame is captioned with the place, the date and what is happening in it. Names only where the subject agreed to be named.
- The whole take
- The client sees an edit; the archive keeps the contact sheets. Nothing is deleted to make a story look tidier.
Nine projects open for 2027.
Commissions are taken all year. Tell us what you want to understand, not which pictures you want.
Commission us