Work in the city
Three jobs from this year. Each one stayed in Chișinău, and each one left with a date written on the estimate before the deposit.
București in the morning, the flat above Valea Morilor, a figure booked on Columna.
A dining room on Strada București
The room seats 28. The window faces a lane, so the light arrives as a slot, not as a wall of sun. We stood in it the week before, once at 07:20 and once at 09:30. At 07:20 the linen held detail. At 09:30 the zinc roof across the lane threw a green fill into every glass. The call was written as 07:10. Stills stopped at 09:25.
The table already lived there. We moved it 70 centimetres back from the sash and stood a black flag on the near edge. Nothing came from the studio except the stand and the body. The plates are the room’s plates. One rim is chipped. Covering the chip would have made a different restaurant, so the chip stays.
The second morning was the film, same window, same flag, same hour. The piece that left is 38 seconds. A cook crosses from the pass to the window once. That crossing is in the cut. We did not add music. At 07:30 a cart goes down the lane, and the tone keeps it.
47 stills went out on the ninth working day. The graded film went out on the sixteenth. The licence on the invoice is the room’s own site and a printed menu card, in Moldova, for three years. It is not a licence for another brand. Guests were not in the brief. The room was closed for those two hours, which is why the pictures are of the table and the plaster, and of one person working.
Three rooms above Valea Morilor
An architect asked for a record of a renovation before furniture arrived. The flat sits above the park. The windows face west. We shot on a Tuesday in September, call 15:40, because the trees throw a green bounce only after the sun drops into them. Earlier the floor is a hard stripe and the white wall clips.
There was no styling. The chair in the frame was left by the contractor. We did not bring a plant, a book, or a throw. 61 frames cover the three rooms, the stair, the meeting of oak and plaster, and the window hardware. The edit is mean on purpose. A room that is about to change does not need a mood layered on top of it.
The files left on the ninth working day, named by room. The licence is a project book and the architect’s own site, for two years, in the Republic of Moldova. It is not a listing, and it is not for a developer’s campaign. We wrote that sentence on the estimate before the deposit, because those are different pictures and a different day rate.
We did not put a drone over Valea Morilor. The park is the view through the glass. From the pavement below you cannot see the rooms, and that is the correct distance. The stair inside the building is narrow. Cases came up once, at the start, and left once, at 18:10, before the light on the floor went blue.
Cloth and a figure on Columna
A shop on Strada Columna needed the spring rail without a white-seamless look. The morning was the blackout room: buttons, cloth, the way a hem sits when nobody is wearing it. Then the street, for the full figure. We waited until the linden on the pavement put the stone in front of the door into shade. Black cloth dies in open sun. In that shade it held. Ninety minutes outside, then we were done.
The sitter was booked as an ordinary stills day. The release was signed at Armenească before we left the hall. We cropped the shop name out of every frame. A letter in a window becomes the subject, and the subject was the cloth.
52 frames. Selects went in four working days because the window on Columna was due to change on the Friday. The full set followed on the ninth. The licence is the shop’s own site and the window print for that season, in Chișinău, and it ends with the season.
The hall portrait on this page is from the same morning, before the cases went into the van. It is the reference for the street light: if the face on Columna had gone harder than this, we would have stopped. It did not, for those ninety minutes. After that the shade broke up, and we packed.