Neon nights: shooting under red light

Red light is the enemy of a photograph. It flattens faces, swallows detail and turns every shadow into the same dark maroon. It is also, at two in the morning in a club in São Paulo, the only light there is.

The trick is to stop fighting it. Let the red fill the frame, find one other colour to carry the picture — here, the green and yellow of a pair of glow sticks — and let the faces be red. Nobody at a party wants to be lit like a passport photo anyway.

Find the one colour that is not red, and build the picture around it.

What I carried

• One camera, one fixed 35mm lens.
• Nothing to change the light, and no flash.
• A notebook for the names of everyone who agreed to be photographed.

The stop sign behind them says pare — stop — which nobody in the room did until the lights came on.