You smell it before you see the building. Not woodsmoke exactly — something slower and sweeter, closer to treacle, which is what happens when timber is cooked for days rather than burnt in an afternoon.
The kilns are in Johor Bahru, close enough to Singapore that you can drive over for the day. There was nothing clever about finding them: a search on Google Maps, then the car. We asked the people we photographed whether they minded being photographed, and they did not.
How a kiln is loaded
Logs in by hand, stood on end, packed tight. Then the kiln is closed and the wood is cooked for weeks at a temperature nobody measures with an instrument. The men who do it read the smoke instead: colour, thickness, and how it comes out of the vents.
The light
Every photographer who goes to a place like this comes back with the same picture, and it is the right picture: a shaft of light through a gap in the roof, made visible by the smoke it is passing through.
What makes it more than a postcard is a person in it, doing the work, who does not look at the camera. That is the only decision available inside a kiln shed: where to stand so that the shaft, the smoke and the man line up, and then how long you are willing to wait there in the heat for him to walk through it.
Expose for the light and the shed goes black. That is fine, and it is more honest than lifting the shadows afterwards until the whole room is visible. Inside, you cannot see into the corners either.
The cats
There are cats. There are always cats. They sleep on the log piles where the wood is warm, they are entirely used to the smoke, and they were the only ones on site with no interest in being anywhere else.
Fifteen frames
This is one of the smallest sets in my archive and one of the most complete. A short visit to a place doing one thing, photographed with one lens, in light that is either there or is not. Nothing else was needed.
The full set is on SmugMug.