Portraits shot at first light.
The brief
People who have already started working while the city is still asleep.
Tomorrow Magazine asked us for a photo editorial for their issue dedicated to work. The starting idea was simple: tell the story of whoever gets up before everyone else, not to dwell on the toil but on the particular light they live in — bakers, athletes, fishermen. No studio, no built set: just the window between four and six in the morning, repeated in different places over two weeks, with the same natural light running through subjects who don't know each other and don't look alike.
Location scouting at dawn.
The approach
We chose to work with natural light only, no panels or flash, so that dawn itself would set the tone of every shot.
Cold and flat at four, warm and full as soon as the sun clears the horizon. Every scout started in the dark, to work out where the light would come from an hour later. Subjects were chosen for the variety of their work more than for how they'd pose: a baker in Chieri, a rowing team on the Po, a fisherman in Camogli. In every portrait the person is caught actually working, not pretending to for the camera.
Testing light and framing before sunrise.
The result
Ten portraits, a single light, eleven different stories of people who start their day early.
The editorial ran across eight pages of Tomorrow Magazine's autumn issue, with an accompanying text gathering the voices of the people photographed. A few shots were also used for the cover and for the issue's social campaign. The project confirmed what we'd hoped from the start: a real dawn was enough to make every portrait different from all the others.
Selected portraits from the final edit.