Photography · · 5 min
The hour before the crowd
On arriving early, waiting longer than is comfortable, and photographing a place everyone has already photographed.
Placeholder essay. Every famous place has an official photograph — the one on the postcard, the one in the guidebook, the one already in your head before you arrive. The only way past it is time. Arrive before the gates, stand where nobody is standing, and wait for the light to do something the postcard never allowed.
The frame I keep from Agra is not the monument. It is the ten minutes when the marble was still cold and the sun had not yet decided what colour it was going to be. Nothing about it was clever. It was simply earlier than everyone else.
That is most of the job, in advertising as much as in photography: get there before the obvious does.
“Get there before the obvious does.”