Office Building in Mexico City

This one is not a photo essay in the usual sense. It is three stills lifted from a short video piece — EDIFICIO 007 — that I shot on a Leica from a rooftop across the street from an ordinary office tower in Mexico City, on an evening in April 2024 when I was supposed to be doing something more productive.

What stopped me was the way the building turned itself on. Floor by floor, window by window, the facade surfaced out of the black like an old CRT monitor warming up — so I leaned into the metaphor and set a line of green terminal text typing across the frame as the lights came up. The building as machine, booting its humans for the night shift.

Watch any office tower long enough after dark and it becomes a wall of small cinemas. A man pacing a conference room three floors up from a woman eating dinner at her desk; a cleaning crew moving through the dark floors like a rumor; whole rows of cubicles burning fluorescent for nobody at all. The Leica's quiet files and that dense, sodium-tinged Mexico City darkness gave the piece its texture — video shot like a photograph, one fixed frame, letting time do the composing.

By full dark the tower had finished loading: a hanging grid of lit rooms, every window a pixel in an image the building was making of itself. I stayed until my card filled, walked down, and joined the street-level traffic of people leaving those same offices, carrying their unphotographed evenings home.

The piece belongs to a strand of my work that has nothing to do with clients and everything to do with standing still in cities at odd hours — the same impulse that once had me circling an empty, fog-drowned kart track in Santiago at 5 a.m. and waiting out the weather in the California desert with nothing but power lines for company. Commercial work teaches you to command a frame. Nights like this teach you to surrender one.