Heroes of the Earth: Bogota's Night Recyclers, in Capes

A campaign with The JuJu Agency photographing Bogota's recicladores - the men and women who pull handcarts of cardboard through the city after dark - in red capes, on the streets they actually work.

Bogota has around twenty thousand recicladores. They work at night, they pull handcarts loaded twice their own height with flattened cardboard and salvaged appliances, and they recover a very large share of everything this city recycles. They are also, for the most part, invisible - the traffic goes around them and nobody looks.

The JuJu Agency came to me with a premise that could have gone very wrong: put them in capes.

Why the cape works

I was cautious at first. A costume on a person doing hard, badly paid work can read as mockery very easily, and the line between honouring somebody and dressing them up is thin.

What makes it hold is that nothing else was staged. These are the streets they work, the carts they own, the loads they had already built that night. The cape is the only fictional object in the frame, and because everything around it is true, it reads as a claim rather than a costume. The argument the campaign is making is simple and literal: this is what a person who saves the city looks like.

Lighting against a moving city

Technically this was the hardest set on this blog. Everything is night, everything is outdoors, and the subjects are on live roads with buses going past a metre away.

The approach was one portable light, close, camera left or right, exposed for the subject, with the shutter dragged long enough to let the city smear behind them. That is where the red and white streaks come from in the frames with the buses. The subject is frozen and lit; Bogota is a blur of light around him. It is a very old technique and it does exactly the right thing here - it makes the person the only stable object in a city that is rushing past them.

“The cape is the only invented thing in the frame. Everything around it is true, so it reads as a claim rather than a costume.”

Photographing work, not poverty

The rule I set myself was that every frame had to show competence. Hands on the cart. A load correctly balanced. A man looking straight down the lens without apology. No frames of people looking defeated, and none shot from above.

Camera height matters more than people think in work like this. Shoot down at somebody and you have made a judgement before anyone reads a word. Everything here is at eye level or slightly below.

The one I still think about

The last frame in the set is a man pushing his cart along the roadside, laughing at something I said. It is the least heroic composition of the thirteen and probably my favourite, because it is the one where the cape stops mattering.

This project sits with the other work where I have followed a job rather than a brand - the firefighters of the 305, and the town in Choco that bottled its own rain for Coca-Cola. Those are the ones people write to me about.