The Night Porter

Chris Shaw, a troubled night porter at London hotels, began to allay his boredom by taking photographs of the guests in unguarded moments.

What he found, to judge from his photographs, was a lot of people stuck in a similar sort of limbo to him. All of them - staff and guests alike - seem somehow adrift, lost in their own internal as well as external darkness. Men lie unconscious on long strips of carpet, or else slump glassy-eyed in chintzy armchairs, their ties twisted like nooses around their necks.

Yet it's not all darkness and gloom. Some of Shaw's pictures are very funny, while others have an alluringly carefree feel to them. These people may be bumping along the bottom, but they're clearly hellbent on having a good time. Two photographs in the book show a naked man wandering down a hotel corridor, beaming happily if unsteadily at the camera. How did those ones come about? I wondered.

'Ah, well, in that particular hotel you'd often find naked people wandering about. They used to get pissed and then get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night - or what they thought was the bathroom. In fact, it would be their bedroom door, and before they realised their mistake the door would have closed behind them.