In the last week of the assignment there were thirty-eight minutes of light that could be used without compromise. Not thirty-eight minutes of daylight — there were rather more of those — but thirty-eight minutes in which the sun was high enough to model a face and low enough not to flatten everything into grey.

Constraint is supposed to be good for photographers, and it mostly is, but the first fortnight of this one was simply frightening. You do not compose carefully when the light is leaving. You shoot, and you shoot the obvious thing, and you come back with a card full of competent images of exactly what you expected to find.

Figures in heavy work clothing crossing an open yard, silhouetted against pale sky.
The shift crossing the yard at 14:20. Twenty minutes of usable light remaining.Hannah Lindqvist for Vision Magazine

What changed the work was giving up on the day. Once I accepted that the light would not be available when the interesting thing happened, I started photographing the waiting instead — the hours before, the preparation, the long stretches in which nothing photographs itself and you have to decide what a picture is.

You stop looking for the moment and start looking at the room. It is a completely different job and it takes about two weeks to make the switch.

The other adjustment was technical and slightly embarrassing to admit: I stopped trying to preserve the shadows. Underexposed frames in these conditions are not a failure to be corrected. The darkness is the subject, and a photograph that pretends otherwise is a photograph of somewhere else.

An interior lit only by a single window, with tools and workwear hanging on a wall.
Interior, mid-afternoon. Available light only.Hannah Lindqvist for Vision Magazine

Six weeks produced eleven pictures I would stand behind, which is a normal yield and would have been a normal yield in June. The difference is that in June I would not have noticed the waiting at all.