This street has a bakery at one end and a stationery shop at the other. Between four and six in the afternoon, most of what happens on it happens between those two doors.
I grew up a few hundred kilometres from here and still found the street unfamiliar. That is part of why I photographed it slowly.
The sequence
- The Place
- The Person
- The Environment
- The Action
- The Detail
- The Relationship
- The Quiet Moment
- The Closing Image
The street is narrow enough that both sides are in shade by five.
Homework gets done on the step outside the stationery shop, because the light there is better than at home.
The shop keeps pens in one drawer and everything else on the wall. The drawer is the part that gets opened.
Bread is carried home flat, across both forearms, so it does not fold before it cools.
A chalk line on the asphalt, redrawn often enough that the older lines are still visible underneath.
An argument about the rules, conducted entirely at the volume of an argument, and settled in under a minute.
Just before six the street empties almost all at once, and stays empty for about a quarter of an hour.
Being from the region is not the same as understanding a street. It only means you know how much you are missing.
The bakery light stays on longest. It is the last thing on the street that is still working.
Field notes
- Photographed over five afternoons. TODO(content): confirm the dates.
- Photographs of children were made with a parent or guardian present and informed; none are published where the context is private.
- Edited for exposure, white balance and crop only.
If this is close to your project
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A short call is usually enough to work out whether a place, a schedule and a set of permissions can hold a story like this one.