Hilary buys one of the new cameras and spends a few days walking around the city, looking for things to photograph, experimenting with different lenses, different shutter speeds. The city swims into being under the surface of the developing fluid, cafes and tram lines rising up with the heavy chemical smell. Streets he has walked everyday for years are suddenly strange in the red light of his studio; familiar faces grow alien and marvelous. He invites his friends over, shows them his work, asks some of them to model for him. Behind the camera he is cool and professional, all lighting angles and focal lengths, cigarettes and liqueurs, posing them this way and that, soothing them with his continual stream of gossip, politics, art theory. In his labs he is vitriolic – pans crash against the walls, prints burn away, faces and bodies are torn apart. Hilary has swallowed his dreams whole, and is struggling – with lens and film, patience and repetition – toward a city he has seen only in instants. He captures it sidelong, peoples it with strangers, spreads it out over the walls of his studio, prepares to move in.