In Conversation: Noor Castellane on Ordinary Light

Noor Castellane has contributed two photographic series to the magazine: Rooms Without Walls, on balconies, in our winter issue, and Light Switches of Strangers, published in August. We talked in her darkroom in Brussels, with the safelight on and a print drying on a line above our heads.

Both of your series are about surfaces in other people's homes. Where did that start?

With moving, I think. I have rented eight flats in twelve years, and each time I moved I noticed that the things I missed about the old place were never the big things. Not the size of the rooms or the view. It was the light switch I could find in the dark, or the balcony rail I leaned on in the evenings. Small surfaces that my hands knew. I started photographing them because I wanted to understand why they mattered so much.

You never photograph faces.

No. People ask whether that is a rule, and it is, but it started as shyness. I am not good at asking strangers for permission. Then I realised that the absence of people was what the photographs were about. A light switch with a grey halo of fingerprints is a portrait of everyone who has lived in that flat. If I put a face in the frame, it becomes a portrait of one person, and it is less true.

Why medium-format film?

Because it is slow. I have to stop, set up, meter, think. A roll has twelve frames, so every one is a decision. And the negatives are large enough that when I print them, you can see the texture of a wall, the grain of the paint, the scratches on a switch plate. The surfaces I photograph are the whole subject, so I need a format that takes surfaces seriously.

You often mention the hour after lunch.

It is my favourite light, and it is completely unglamorous. Photographers talk about golden hour and blue hour. Nobody talks about the hour after lunch, when the sun has moved off the front of the building and the light inside a flat goes soft and a little yellow, like weak tea. It is the light most people see their homes in on a Saturday. I think it is the most honest light there is.

What are you working on now?

Doorframes. Specifically, the marks people make on them to measure children. I have found forty so far, in rented flats, most of them half painted over by landlords. I am photographing what is left before it disappears.