Night Shift

There is a stretch of Bruckner Boulevard in Mott Haven where the auto-body shops are stacked one after another for almost half a mile. Most of them shut by eight at night. One of them — I have agreed not to name it — runs twenty-four hours, with a second shift that starts at nine and a third that starts at two in the morning. They do mostly insurance work for fleet vehicles: livery cabs, delivery vans, the occasional unmarked NYPD interceptor. I rode along for seven nights in March.

The night shift is its own world. The lights are different — sodium streetlamps outside, a single column of bare halogen over each lift inside — and the shop sounds carry differently because the streets are mostly empty. You can hear the air gun two blocks away. The conversations are slower. The coffee is worse. Almost everyone working that shift has done it for at least eight years and almost everyone has at least one other job during the day.

I shot the whole project on a Leica Q3 with the lens wide open. Film would have meant a tripod, and a tripod would have meant a different project — a more posed one, where everyone is aware of the camera the entire time. The Q3 with its 28mm lens at f/1.7 let me work close, hand-held, in light I would not have believed I could shoot in five years ago. About a third of the frames here were exposed at ISO 12,800. The grain pattern in the highlights — small and round, almost like film — is one of the reasons I bought the camera.

I asked Reynaldo, who runs the second shift, what was different about working at night. He thought about it for a long time and then said, in Spanish, that during the day the work is the same but the people who come in are different. At night, he said, nobody comes in with a small dent and a long story. At night the cars come on flatbeds and the drivers are tired and the conversation is just about the work. He liked that. He said it was the closest thing to honest the auto-body business ever gets.

The shop has agreed to let me come back for a longer project in the fall. I want to follow one car all the way through, from the flatbed in at three in the morning to the customer pickup three days later. The frames here are from the first week of reporting, edited down from a few thousand to twenty-two. These six are the ones that keep the night in them best.

Filed under urban · part of Night Shift.