Issue Nº1 of the zine was all sugar, so it felt right that Issue Nº2 would be all sweat. The catalogue brief was simple: real workout, real effort, golden morning light on old stone. The call time was seven in the morning, which is a time I had previously only seen from the other side.
Here is what nobody tells you about fitness shoots: you do every exercise at a third of the speed, hold the worst part of the movement for the length of a photograph, and repeat it until the light is right. A slow squat with your arms overhead sounds gentle. By round twelve it is a personality test.
The blue dumbbells became the stars of the set. They matched my cap, they matched the sky, and they sat in the foreground of every frame like they had an agent. When we printed the issue in riso blue, the whole shoot looked like it had been planned by someone with impeccable taste instead of assembled from whatever the gym had in the five pound rack.
My favourite frame is the cross-legged one at the end, when we had officially wrapped and I sat down on the warm stone to just breathe. Joe kept shooting. The frames where nobody is performing are always the ones we staple in the middle of the zine, where the good stuff goes.