Karim Haddad-Wedeking at the Maybachufer Stand

I had seen Karim twice during the casting week — once at the Sonnenallee workwear studio where he is a regular, once here at his own Saturday stand. The stand is where he is most himself, so I asked to come back early, before the walk-ups, and shoot him setting it up. He gave me the same condition both times: stay out of the way when a customer is at the rail. That set the rhythm of the morning.

The first frame is what I came for. He is fully inside the work — folding a sun-faded brown duck-canvas chore jacket, sleeves rolled, eyes down on the fabric. The stand is half his trade and half his archive: crates of indigo denim he has graded by fade, a rail of jackets he keeps for himself between weekends. The Carhartt label on the chest is the brand-anchor the brief wanted, but the argument of the picture is the hands and the attention, not the logo.

The second frame happened in a lull. A customer had drifted off and Karim leaned a forearm on the rail and looked straight into the lens — calm, not posing, the way he looks when he is deciding whether to trust you. The faded indigo chore jacket over a plain grey tee is his own; the small stick-and-poke at his right shoulder, the Beiruti-Arabic letter for his mother, sits under the rolled sleeve. The canal is behind him, grey morning light off the water, the market awnings still half-empty. This is the portrait that carries the editorial: a 24-year-old second-generation Berliner who sells the city's old work-clothes and wears them without irony.

The making-of frame is the setup, before customers. My Mamiya RB67 is on the low tripod in the foreground; Karim is behind it adjusting the hung row of chore jackets, glancing back between frames. I shot the editorial on Portra 400 over about an hour — seventy frames, eleven approved. The discipline was the same as it always is on a working stand: shoot when he is either fully inside the work or fully out of it, never in the half-second where the attention is breaking. The frames in between, I let pass.

What this editorial argues — and what a Carhartt-WIP working-issue can use it for — is that Berlin's secondhand-workwear trade has its own quiet seriousness. Sonnenallee studio into a Maybachufer Saturday stand, a young seller who knows every fade in his crates by hand. The brand is the surface. The attention is the substance.

— Théo