Faces Filled the Studio A Long Shoot

Our work with Phaidon began in a small room filled with soft light and quiet tension, shaped by the idea of placing hundreds of faces into one long visual line. The aim was to build a world where skin, gaze and tone stand closer than they do in real life, letting each tiny shift become part of a larger story. We spent the full day moving between setups, watching how small details turned into full scenes, and how a face shifts when the camera waits a moment longer. It became a calm but charged space, where clarity and raw edges lived side by side, held together by a rhythm.

Close Frames

The main thought was to treat each face as a small landscape, letting light guide the viewer across soft lines and quiet marks. We worked close to the skin, using slow moves and narrow light to hold the mood in place. Each frame added a tiny note of tone or depth until the images formed a long, breathing chain. It wasn’t about style but about presence, about getting so close that the portraits lost their borders and became something wider. The final set holds this calm tension. Raw, warm, and honest. Shaped by a single day in the studio, carried into more than three hundred pages of the book.