The Night Shift

Every city has a second population. It arrives as the first one goes home. While most people are asleep, thousands of others are awake and working — baking tomorrow's bread, cleaning offices, driving night buses, stocking supermarket shelves, caring for patients, repairing roads that can only be closed when nobody is using them.

They are mostly invisible to the rest of us. Their work is designed to be finished before we wake. For six months, I spent two or three nights a week trying to make them a little more visible.

Asking permission

Documentary work like this depends entirely on trust. I didn't want to photograph anyone without their knowledge, and I didn't want to turn people's working lives into a backdrop. So the project began slowly, with a lot of conversations and very few photographs.

I started at an all-night café near the railway station, run by a woman named Dolores who has worked the overnight shift there for twenty-two years. She knows almost every night worker in the area by name and order. Once she understood what I was doing, she began introducing me to her regulars. Without her, this series would not exist.

The bakers

The bakery shift starts at ten at night and finishes at six. Five people work in a hot, flour-dusted room the size of a large kitchen, producing bread for cafés and shops across the city. The light is warm and yellow, the air thick with steam. Nobody talks much, except to shout out times.

I photographed them across four nights. What fascinated me was the rhythm — a choreography of kneading, shaping, proving and baking that repeats every night with tiny variations. By the end of the first week, I could predict where each person would be at any given minute, which made it possible to anticipate the photograph rather than chase it.

Light at night

Night photography of this kind is mostly a negotiation with bad light. Fluorescent tubes, sodium streetlamps, the cold blue of LED floodlights and the occasional warm glow of an old tungsten bulb — all of them render colour differently, and many flicker in ways the eye can't see but the camera can.

I chose to shoot the series mostly in colour, because the clash of light sources felt like part of the story. The orange of the depot, the green tinge of the hospital corridor, the warm yellow of the bakery: each place has its own artificial weather, and the people who work there live inside it for eight hours a night.

Nobody photographs the night shift, because nobody is awake to see it.

The quiet hours

Between about three and five in the morning, the city reaches its stillest point. Even the night workers slow down. Drivers sit in their cabs with flasks of tea. Cleaners take their breaks on office steps. A nurse I photographed described this period as "the long corridor," when the night feels as though it will never end.

These became my favourite images in the series: not people working, but people waiting, resting, thinking — the small private moments inside a long shift.

Dawn

Every night ended the same way: with the light changing. The sky would grey, then pale, and the first day workers would begin to appear — joggers, early commuters, delivery vans. The night population would start heading home, passing the day population on the pavement without either really noticing the other.

The final photograph in the series shows exactly that moment: a cleaner leaving an office building at dawn as the first office worker arrives with a coffee. They pass within a metre of each other. Neither looks up.

Editing the series

The hardest part of this project was not the photography but the editing. Over sixty nights I made several thousand frames, and many of them were good. Choosing between them meant choosing between people, which felt uncomfortable. In the end, June and I built the sequence around the shape of a single night: arrival, work, the long corridor of the small hours, and dawn.

Every person who appears was shown their photographs before publication, and several helped choose which image of themselves to include. Two people asked for their portraits to be removed, and they were. The series is better for that process, even if it is smaller.

Technical notes

• Cameras: full-frame digital; occasional 35mm film for black-and-white portraits
• Lenses: 35mm and 50mm primes, mostly wide open
• Light: available light only — no flash, at the request of the people photographed
• Duration: 26 weeks, roughly 60 nights

With thanks

To Dolores, and to every night worker who let me into their shift. Each person in this series has seen and approved the photographs of them before publication. A small exhibition print of their own portrait was given to each of them.

Prints

Four photographs from The Night Shift are available as limited editions of 20. A portion of every sale goes to a local charity supporting shift workers' wellbeing. See Prints.