Two chairs block the lower part of the frame, showing only their backrests. Beyond them a light wood-colored desk runs on in a long line, and a gray partition cuts across the middle at a low height. The left wall is all glass.
The blinds are halfway down, slicing the window into horizontal stripes, and the light coming through them is dim. Though it is midday, the whole interior has settled into a greenish gray.
The ceiling lights are off. About ten fluorescent rails are lined up along the window and not one of them is lit, and exposed pipes and ducts run above them. Lighting is what you turn off when no one is there. What cannot be turned off is something else.
Rent, air conditioning, security, maintenance fees. Even with the two black outlet boxes on the desktop sitting open with nothing plugged into them, the cost this floor generates each month barely goes down. An office is not a thing that grows and shrinks to match headcount, and it hardens by the unit of floor area once contracted.
A thick square column in the middle divides the view exactly in half. On the left is the window row, on the right another zone beyond a glass partition. There are at least two work zones on this floor and both are empty.
Looking again, only one window straight ahead in the distance has its blind raised. Through it the city skyline enters, cut off in pale blue. It is the only part of this photograph that is not gray.
It can be read as meaning that the outside keeps turning, however faintly, and only the inside has stopped, but it can also be read the other way. If the work has not disappeared but has simply stopped passing through this floor area, that blue fragment becomes a mark of where the work moved to.
In the lower left corner, between the desk legs, a teal object is half hidden. It cannot be made out whether it is a bag someone left behind or a chair part. A floor vacated for a moment and a floor left empty for a long time cannot be told apart in a photograph. The only thing that knows the difference is the maintenance bill.
