Long day in the studio. I closed out a block of Tokyo faces this morning and walked straight into London, and the switch between them did something I keep trying to explain to people who think casting is about pretty.
A city writes itself into a face differently each time. Tokyo writes it in restraint — the diversity there isn't in the street, it's in the work. A pattern-cutter's reading glasses. A sembei roaster's hands at seventy. You have to read the occupation, not the neighbourhood. Nothing announces itself.
London is the opposite and I'd forgotten how much I love it for that. Here a face carries three, four generations and shows you all of them. A Lewisham woman with her grandmother's gold crucifix at her throat — Clarendon to Lewisham Hospital in 1961, a whole Windrush line folded into one calm jaw. A Hammersmith trade man, ruddy and broken-nosed, the unmarked white working London nobody photographs because it doesn't perform. A Somali woman whose composure has a gravity her years can't explain, and you don't ask, because the answer is a war she was three years old for.
That's the thing the agencies sand off. They want the bones and not the line that made them. I spent the afternoon refusing to do that — building each one from the whole story down, because you feel it in the face when it's there and you feel the hole when it isn't.
I'm tired in the good way. The wall's full of people who feel real to me now, and tomorrow I keep going. East, south, north — Hackney, Peckham, Tottenham. The city's still writing.
À tantôt.