Contact sheet: roll 011
The full roll in order, including the eleven frames that were nothing and the one that was not.
Publishing the whole roll is uncomfortable and that is roughly the point. Edited work implies the photographer saw it coming. A contact sheet shows you the eleven attempts before the thing that worked, and usually reveals that the thing that worked was not what was being attempted.
Frames 01–04
Walking. Nothing decided yet. Frame 02 is almost something and I did not notice at the time — I was looking at the wrong side of the underpass.
Frames 05–11
This is where I got stuck. Seven frames of the same composition with tiny variations, which is what I do when I can feel there is a picture somewhere and I am trying to find it by brute force. It does not work. It has never once worked.
Seven frames of the same idea is not persistence. It is not having had a second idea.
Frame 12
I turned around. That is the entire technical explanation. The light I had been fighting for seven frames was behind me and doing something far more interesting to a wall than it was ever going to do to my subject.
Frames 13–36
Nothing. I knew I had it and stopped looking properly, which is its own kind of failure and one I have not fixed.