Light Switches of Strangers

Almost every flat I have visited in the last year has a light switch by the door, and I have photographed nearly all of them. The series started as a joke with a friend who was moving out. It became a habit, then a project, then something closer to a diary.

Light switches are the most touched and least looked-at objects in a home. Nobody chooses them. They come with the building, and they collect a record of the people who used them: the grey halo of fingers around the plate, a layer of paint that stops a few centimetres short, a switch installed upside down so that down means on and every guest gets it wrong.

I photograph them straight on, at the height of my shoulder, in whatever light the room has at that moment. I never clean them. The dirt is the portrait.

The series now has a little over two hundred frames. Laid out together on a table they look like a catalogue of very small doors. People who see them tend to go quiet and then tell me about a switch in a house they grew up in: which one was stiff, which one sparked, which one they had to stand on a chair to reach. That is what the project is really collecting.