There is a specific kind of looking that happens when you don’t mean to look. On a bus. Through a gap in a curtain. At someone across a courtyard who hasn’t noticed you yet. It is not surveillance. It is not desire, exactly. It sits somewhere between recognition and intrusion, and you know it when it happens because something in your chest tightens slightly, like a small apology forming before you’ve done anything wrong.
This series began without a concept. That is the honest version. The longer version involves a conversation in February about why photography always seems to arrive late — after the moment, after the meaning, after the thing that made the thing worth shooting. We wanted to try shooting earlier. Before the agreement. Before the pose.
The twelve frames in this editorial were taken over two afternoons in two locations: a stairwell in Neukölln and a disused gymnasium in Lichtenberg that a friend of a friend had keys to for reasons that were never fully explained. The light in the stairwell was wrong in a way that took four hours to understand was actually right. The gymnasium had a quality of silence specific to large empty rooms — the kind that feels inhabited even when no one is there.
The people in these photographs were asked to do nothing. This is harder than it sounds. Doing nothing in front of a camera requires more discipline than doing something, because the body’s instinct is always to perform, and the performance is always slightly wrong, and knowing it’s slightly wrong makes it worse. Most sessions took forty minutes before anyone stopped trying.
What remains, across all twelve frames, is a kind of evidence we’re not sure how to categorise. Not documentary. Not fashion. Not portrait in the way portrait usually means. Soft evidence, maybe — of people existing in rooms, in light, in the particular flatness of a Tuesday afternoon when nothing is being decided.
The grain is not a mistake.