That is me at the end of the row, and I am not in the light.
The frame runs down the open side of the racks, which is the side you never see in photographs of these rooms because photographs of these rooms are always made from the front. Front faces are designed. Flanks are not. What you get here is punched upright after punched upright, the fixing holes running the full height, black loops of surplus cable hung on hooks halfway up, a coil of trunking, a stack of loose filler plates on a trolley at the lower right. Two side panels are leaning against the first cabinet where I took them off and never carried them anywhere.
The lamp is a small LED floodlight lying on the floor at the base of the last cabinet. That is where an electrician puts a light: on the deck, aimed at the work, so it lights your hands and nothing else. It throws a wedge up the aisle and puts a hard reflection on the concrete, and it throws my shadow back toward the camera the whole length of the row.
I set a ten second timer, walked to the end, and stood. Hands in pockets. Back turned. I did not look round and I did not do it twice.
The cabinets come to my chin. I am five foot nine. That is the only reason there is a person in this picture, because a rack photographs identically at any size and a viewer has no way to know whether they are looking at something the height of a filing cabinet or something the height of a room. A man in a jacket solves that in one exposure. Everything else about my being in it, I would have preferred to avoid.
Every institution in this cycle has been a room with a person taken out of it. So it is worth saying what happened when I put one back. The correct place for him turned out to be past the light, facing away, doing nothing. That is not a pose I chose for effect. It is what a person does in a machine room. You come to the end of the row, and you stop, and you listen, because the room is supposed to tell you how it is by sound, and if the sound is right you turn around and leave.
I stood there for the full ten seconds and heard the fan of the floodlight and a car on the road outside.
There is a version of this in which the figure is turned three quarters into the beam with his face half lit, and I know precisely how to do that, and it would have been about him. He would have become the subject and the row would have become the setting. So he has his back to it. The subject of the picture is the aisle. The man is a scale reference standing in the dark at the end of his own building, and I would rather be that than the other thing.