Chris Shaw, as he tells it, left to get the papers one morning in 1993 and returned two weeks later to find that, not unreasonably, his girlfriend had changed the locks on their flat. Shaw liked a drink back then. Needing money and a roof over his head, he got himself a hotel job.
And so began his decade-long stint as a night porter at a number of London hotels, including the Bonnington and Langham Hilton. Shaw filled in the down-time shooting nocturnal life – the lost and locked-out, the hookers and drunks, drivers and firemen – in strange, black and white half-light.
The images resemble nowhere you’ve ever stayed, but perhaps the hotel in Murakami’s Dance, Dance, Dance, where the Sheep Man lives with the dark closing in. Life as a Night Porter is, in short, Shaw’s decade of darkness. ‘It is a hotel of my own imagination,’ he says. ‘In reality, the hotels bear little resemblance to my pictures. It depends how you look at things. In my experience, heaven and hell are right here on earth – and you can stay in either.’
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INFORMATION
Life as a Night Porter, Chris Shaw (Twin Palms, £38.50)
