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 photographer is noticed for about a fortnight. Everything made in that fortnight is a picture of somebody being photographed, which is a different subject from the one the client asked about.
So the assignment is priced in weeks, not days, and the first two are budgeted as the cost of becoming uninteresting. There is no cheaper way to do it, and we have tried.
The edit that comes back is thirty to sixty frames. The contact sheets behind it stay in the building, whole.
The five weeks, in order
4,860 frames · 1,320 from inside
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Week one
Arriving. The photographer is a stranger with a camera and everybody behaves like it. None of these frames are why we came.
780 frames · none from inside
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Week two
Being tolerated. The same faces, the same route, at the same hour. Nothing is filed and nothing is asked for.
820 frames · none from inside
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Week three
Being ignored, which is the whole point of the five weeks. The first frames from inside.
960 frames · 260 from inside
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Week four
Inside. The work the commission was actually for, mostly made in rooms we were not allowed into in week one.
1,040 frames · 420 from inside
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Week five
Leaving, and the second pass: the frame that was missed, shot properly.
1,260 frames · 640 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.
Five weeks. One place.
€14,000 with every cost in it, answered within two working days, including when the answer is no.
Commission us