Same window, most days

There's a coffee shop on Bond Street, just off the North Laine, that I keep coming back to. It's my favourite in Brighton, and it sits on one of my regular routes around town, so most days I end up outside it at least once. I'll get a coffee, stand around for a bit, take a few frames. Sometimes it's the start of a walk and I'm just warming up. Sometimes I'm passing back through at the end. It bookends a lot of my days without me really planning it that way.

What pulls me in is the window. There are these layers stacked on top of each other. The busy street out front, the people sitting outside, the big lettering across the glass, and then whoever happens to be on the other side of it, inside, in their own world. When they line up you get this graphic, almost theatrical thing happening, and it changes completely depending on the light, the weather, and who walks into it. I like how much comes out of one fixed spot.

I've been shooting it on and off for about a year and a half now. A lot of the time I get nothing. It's closed, or there's no one outside, or it's just messy and doesn't come together. But I keep going back. The staff are lovely, they know what I'm up to by now, I've shared the pictures with them and we put a few up on Instagram a while back. I've just kept quietly adding to it.

This isn't really the kind of photography I usually do. Standing in one place taking the same shot over and over is almost the opposite of how I normally work. But that repetition is exactly what I've become interested in. The same frame, again and again, holding still while everything inside it keeps changing.

I started doing it before I knew it was a thing. Then I found a book called TTP by Hayahisa Tomiyasu, which won the MACK First Book Award, and it's been in my head ever since. He photographed a table tennis table outside his window in Leipzig over a few years, and almost nobody in it is playing table tennis. They're sunbathing on it, sitting on it, using it for all sorts. Same frame, endless different life. Mine doesn't do anything that clever and it isn't at that level, but the idea of just picking a frame and staying with it really got me.

I'm not sure yet what this becomes, if anything. For now it's just my Bond Street frames, a small daily habit I can't quite let go of.