Late Afternoon Workers

At Place de la Monnaie, in Bruxelles, late-afternoon workers look their life go by, while the rest of the world, enjoy the fun.

This photo felt less like a building and more like a roll of exposed film.

Fifteen windows, side by side. Fifteen little theatres. The framing is perfect—not by accident, but by architecture. A row of lives unfolding under fluorescent light. You can almost hear the hum.

Some rooms are empty. Some are dim. In a few, people remain—cleaning up, wrapping gifts, turning off screens. There are Christmas trees, forgotten chairs, coats slung over partitions. And above all, stillness.

Each window holds its own shot. Unrelated, disconnected. A visual non-sequitur. But placed side by side, they become something else: a narrative without dialogue, stitched together by time and structure. A panorama of parallel lives in pause.

There’s something cinematic in the way it all aligns. It reminded me of watching an old contact sheet—the kind where every frame is a different scene, unrelated in content but unified by light and moment. This isn’t a single photograph. It’s a sequence. And the story isn’t told by the action, but by its absence.

That’s the power of the city at night. You don’t need access. You don’t need to knock. You just look. And suddenly, you’re part of the quiet symphony of office after hours—routine, repetition, and the rituals we perform behind glass, believing no one sees.

A thousand stories. None connected. And yet, somehow, all in the same place.