Lauren Clem and Jonathan Pitts-Wiley joined “Behind the Story” this week to discuss their recent Rhode Island Monthly piece highlighting people who work the night shift across a range of industries.
The story, “Working the Night Shift,” appears in this month’s issue of Rhode Island Monthly.
Lauren Clem, a senior editor, and Jonathan Pitts-Wiley, a photographer, shadowed workers in fields including hospitality, health care, policing, fishing and restaurants.
“I am not normally working the night shift, so we had some very sleepless few weeks,” Clem said. “The majority we did on separate nights, and we tried to line them up chronologically within the feature.”
Pitts-Wiley, a North Providence-based portrait and documentary photographer, partnered with Clem to capture moments experienced by those featured in the piece. He said he aimed to respect the dignity of his subjects while using light in different ways to capture compelling images.
“For me, it just came down to what is visually interesting and trying to create images that are compelling irrespective of having all the context,” Pitts-Wiley said. “The viewer is not in the room with you. They don’t know the smell, they don’t have the context, they only have the image.”
Later in the show, Kim and Eli discussed the “stories we wish we wrote,” including: