Chris Shaw made Life as a Night Porter while working in London hotels over a period of ten years. Carrying a camera through his shifts, he photographed staff, guests and the unexpected situations that emerged during the night. The project grows from a worker’s repeated presence in these spaces. Its viewpoint includes the people who keep a hotel functioning as well as those who pass through it temporarily.

The photographs bring together fatigue, sociability and the worn details of hotel interiors. In the publisher’s samples, a reception sign, a group gathered at a counter and a reclining guest all belong to the same nocturnal environment. Shaw’s account of taking pictures to stay awake makes the camera part of the duration of work. The resulting images suggest how attention can move between routine tasks and encounters that interrupt them, turning a shift into a sequence of observations.

Published by Twin Palms in 2005, this hardcover has 64 pages and 64 duotone plates in a twelve-by-sixteen-inch format. Its large scale gives the monochrome photographs room to register both people and the spaces surrounding them. The front cover combines a hotel sign and an urban street view, introducing the relationship between a public facade and the experiences contained behind it. The book gathers the photographs into a setting of its own.

Life as a Night Porter invites readers to consider the hotel as a place experienced differently by workers and visitors. A brief stay and a long succession of shifts produce different kinds of familiarity. Shaw’s pictures hold these perspectives close together without making the building merely a backdrop. The sequence offers a personal account of a working world in which ordinary service, chance meetings and exhaustion repeatedly share the same rooms.