“This place is big,” I said.
“Big?” said Sam. “It’s ninety meters wide and three hundred meters long. You could lose an army in here. You could fit 600 double-decker buses. And plenty of other stuff in the gaps”
I said. “Photography made difficult.”
“Difficult, but interesting,” he said, “Did you bring a wide angle lens?”
“That would be misleading,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said. “try to fit all this into one frame, boom—distortion city.”
“I don’t want to live in distortion city,” I said.
“Nobody does,” he said. “fix it in post”
We walked through the cavernous halls. The floor grid stretched out like some kind of Mondrian fever dream, bright and geometric. It was wayfinding, but also art. It was design, but also storage. It was well – endless – like that warehouse they leave the Ark of the Covenant in at the end of one of those Indiana Jones movies..
“It needs little wooden pews” he said “like a cathedral, maybe we should have painted the ceiling too”
“Smart.” I said
He smiled. “yeah” delighted with that idea.
We moved on. The place was eerily quiet. It was a controlled environment, after all. No unnecessary noise, no unnecessary heat, no unnecessary humidity. The air was still, the building was still, a kind of ache, anticipating the collection.
“Can you make it pop,” he said.
“Yup” I said, “that’s what the No:11 slider in photoshop is for, haven’t used it in a while”
“ But that’s the story, right?”
“That’s the story,” I agreed.
We reached the end of the hall. He stared down the length of it, I don’t think he could quite get his head around it either.
“So what do you think?” I asked.
He exhaled, “This place is big”
National Collections Centre photographed for Sam Jacob
