The doors are shut and there is nothing behind them.
I built this row out of ten cabinet shells bought by weight from a decommissioned exchange, steel frames a little taller than me, perforated round-hole doors, four castors under each one. The doors are original. I did not clean them. What you can see on the face of the nearest one is the raised boss of the latch, two blanked hinge plates, and the scale of the punching, which is close to a thousand holes across a door and is there so that air can be pulled through a machine that is no longer inside it.
They stand on a raised floor I laid myself, forty-eight tiles on steel stringers over the concrete of a leased bay behind a tire shop. At the bottom left a tile is lifted and leaning against its neighbour with the void open under it. I left it that way for the whole of the shoot. In every machine room I have been allowed into, and there have not been many, a tile is up somewhere and stays up until the job is finished.
The only light in the picture is a caged hand lamp lying on its side on the tile at the lower right, cord looping back into the dark. Twenty seconds at f/8. The lamp is so close to the floor that it burns the tile it lies on to white and gives me nothing above chest height, which is accurate. Nobody in a room like this has ever had light where they wanted it.
A cold aisle is a real term and not a mood. It is the side of the row you stand on to face the intake, and it is cold because chilled air is pushed up through the floor and drawn into the machines. The heat comes out the other side, into the hot aisle, where you do not stand. So the room has two climates and both of them are addressed to the equipment. The comfortable one is a side effect. You are standing in the machines’ inhale.
Mine is cold in a way I did not plan. Nothing in these cabinets makes heat, so the bay simply took the temperature of a November night in an uninsulated unit, which was four degrees. The aisle was cold because it was cold outside. It photographed identically.
The doors are latched. I latched them. There is nothing in any of these cabinets to protect from anything, and I went down the row before the exposure and turned all ten latches anyway, because an unlatched door hangs a finger proud of the frame and the line of the row goes wrong. So the first honest fact of this series is that I secured ten empty boxes to make a straight edge, and I have been turning that over ever since.