A city, twice a day

Elena wanted a series about the hour on either side of the working day — the city arriving and the city leaving. We shot it over six weeks, always at the same two windows, always from street level.

Constraints we set

• One focal length: 35mm, so the frames sit at walking distance rather than compressed from a rooftop.
• No people as subjects. People appear, but as movement, never as portrait.
• No color grading beyond a shared profile, so the change across the series is the season, not the edit.

What the series is about

Cities photograph badly in the middle of the day because the light is directly overhead and nothing has an edge. At the ends of the day, everything vertical throws a shadow across everything horizontal, and the geometry that architects drew becomes visible again.

The building did not change. The angle the sun hit it did, and that turned out to be the whole subject.

The final edit is thirty-two frames, printed at 60cm and hung as a single run.