If your organization has a project that runs for months, most of it is going unrecorded right now. Groups call a photographer for the ribbon cutting, and by then the only thing left to photograph is a finished object and a crowd standing in front of it. Public art documentation means being there while the work is still happening, and this is what that looked like across three Cambridge Arts projects this year.

By the time a project opens, the scaffolding is down and the crews are already on the next job. Whatever went wrong and got sorted out along the way is not written down anywhere, because the people who sorted it out were busy sorting it out.

That becomes a problem months later when someone has to write the grant report, the annual report, or the letter back to the donor who funded it. A photo of the finished thing is the weakest image in the whole file. It shows a result and almost none of the work, and most of the people who did that work have already moved on to something else.

There is no way to go back for it.

Public art documentation, the way we do it with Cambridge Arts, means a separate film for each project. Not one long piece with every artwork in it. Four commissions, four documentaries, each built around one artist and one artwork.

For each project, that means returning to the site as the work progresses, sitting down with the artist for a full interview, and coming back again once the surrounding space is finished and open. The last visit is the public celebration, because a public artwork is not really done when the artist puts the brush down. It is done when people start using the space around it.

This is planned and priced as multi-visit work from the start. It is not one shoot that grew. If your organization wants a record like this, the scoping conversation happens before anything gets built.

This is the behind the scenes video from our first visit, and it opens with me asking why I am wearing a hard hat.

It is a fair question, and the answer is most of what this work actually looks like. We showed up in hard hats, checked in before we could go anywhere, and walked into a building that was still under construction. We met Arthur and Jacob that day for the first time, while they were prepping the walls for the mosaic panels, and we filmed them working upstairs on the other install area.

Public art usually goes into a building or a plaza that is still being built, so the schedule belongs to the general contractor more than it does to us or to the artist. Getting cleared onto a site matters most at the start. Once the crews know us, we can usually just walk on.

The first of these films we finished is artist Kenji Nakayama’s mosaic installation at the new Cambridge Fire Headquarters.

The mosaics pull directly from the work of the people who will use the building. Fire trucks, helmets, axes, pry bars. The imagery ties the artwork to the equipment and the traditions of the department, which makes it a very different thing from art placed in a lobby because a lobby needed art.

The video is largely assembled, and it has one chapter left that we cannot film yet. The mosaics are installed. The building around them is not finished. Cambridge Arts wants us back once construction is complete and the doors open, so the mosaics can be filmed in the environment they were made for, along with the celebration when the building opens.

The artwork is already there. The last chapter is waiting on the building to catch up.

Kenji Nakayama on site, watching his artwork go up.

The mosaics were fabricated and installed by Mosaika, a Montreal company that has been producing large-scale mosaic work since 1998.

Arthur and Jacob, two of their installers, were on site putting the pieces together. We filmed them and we put them in the video.

That decision is the whole argument for this kind of coverage. A finished mosaic looks like one artist’s idea, when it is really one artist’s idea plus a fabrication shop plus two people spending days setting it into a wall. Kenji gives you the concept and Arthur and Jacob give you the labor. Leave them out and the record is wrong.

Every project like this has that layer. City staff, contractors, fabricators, construction crews. Almost all of it goes invisible the moment the project is finished.

A sit down interview is a strange thing to ask of somebody. There is a camera in front of them, a light off to the side, a microphone on their shirt, and a stranger asking them to explain in one clean take something they have been thinking about for two years. Plenty of people who could talk about their own work for an hour over coffee will tighten up the second it starts, and that has more to do with the setup than with the person.

So we do not put everything on the interview.

On some visits we mic the artist while they are working and ask about whatever is in front of them right then. It is a short conversation rather than a session, and the answers come easier because they are describing something they are in the middle of doing. We also end up with audio that pairs directly to the footage we are already shooting.

Peter Gibson, who is painting eight walls at 333 Webster Avenue, gave us one of those. He was weighing whether to paint in black, which would have taken far longer than the schedule allowed and would not have given him what he wanted, against outlining in white and power washing it off later. That decision never comes up in a sit down interview, because by then it is settled and he has stopped thinking about it. He also walked us through pulling materials from around the site to build texture on the walls, which works there because the lot used to be Phil’s Towing and there was plenty of it lying around.

Kenji did something similar at the fire headquarters. He brought Iris out of the upper mosaic space and onto the roof to show her the buildings around the department that shaped what he was making. That ended up in the final video.

Donnie, who worked alongside Peter, turned out to be the opposite case. He was completely at home in the interview chair and gave long, clear answers on the first take.

You cannot know in advance which one you are getting, and that is the reason to build a film out of more than one hour of somebody’s day. A nervous subject still ends up with a good film. A natural one gives you twice as much. Either way, the working conversation is what gives the interview its context and gives the b-roll something to sit under.

None of that is available on a single booking, where the interview is the only recording you get.

The second project is artist Peter Gibson, painting two buildings at 333 Webster Avenue. Eight walls in total.

Rather than eight separate pieces, the walls are organized around the four seasons. Fall, winter, spring, summer, moving across the buildings. The scale is what makes it worth filming over time, because you can watch the idea travel from one wall to the next and see how the parts start relating to each other, which is not something you can read off the finished result.

We are filming Peter while he works and returning as it develops.

At Carl Barron Plaza in Central Square, artist Sophy Tuttle is painting the Ribbon, the sculptural form that runs through the redesigned plaza and doubles as seating, lighting, and a performance platform. The City commissioned her through Cambridge Arts under the Percent-for-Art program, which sets aside one percent of municipal construction costs for site-specific artwork.

When she arrived on her first day, the panels had scrapes and scuffs on them. Before she could put down a single line, they had to be sanded, repaired, and primed.

She was there alone that day, and she worked out quickly that she was not going to do both. Sanding and spray priming a structure that size is its own job, and it is not something you do with one hand while making decisions about color with the other. So she went back to Cambridge Arts, and they secured her an assistant artist who could sand and prime ahead of her while she painted behind.

That solved the problem. It did not buy back the days. She got about halfway through before she had to leave for other commissions around the country, and the Ribbon sits half painted until she returns in mid September to finish it. This is not the first Cambridge project we have filmed that ended up waiting on something outside the artist’s control.

Priming the Ribbon at Carl Barron Plaza, before any paint went down.

Lillian Hsu, Director of Public Art and Exhibitions at Cambridge Arts, has been our contact across these projects. This is what she said about working with us.

“We have been working with David and Iris Matthews of Camayah Visuals on multiple projects related to our Cambridge Public Art Program. They bring artistry and technical knowledge to the process of building video stories that go beyond documentation. Because our public art commissions are part of city construction projects, David and Iris have had to negotiate construction site visits and last-minute scheduling in order to capture key segments through photo, video, and audio while an artwork is being installed. All the while, they have their camera rolling and look for serendipitous moments they might want to include from anyone on site who could have an interesting angle on the story. They always have their eyes and ears open. We also have a gallery for exhibitions around art in the public realm. Camayah Visuals created a beautiful video story of artist Michael Talbot and his exhibition. I always feel confident letting David and Iris do their work as they wish, because I know they’ll assemble all the pieces to produce something meaningful and visually compelling that will enrich the experience of our public art projects for our audiences.”

Arthur and Jacob are what that looks like in practice. Two installers on a job nobody was going to film, in the video because we were there and they had something to say.

A building renovation. A capital campaign. A new program in its first year. A park, a gallery, a facility.

The decision worth making now is not who photographs the opening. It is who is there for the eighteen months before it, and whether anyone is recording it while it is still happening.

That is what public art documentation is for, and it is the same approach whether the subject is a mural or a building.

We build that kind of record through our ongoing content partnerships, where multi-visit documentation is scoped and scheduled up front rather than added at the end. That structure came out of a conversation with a client who wanted something a single booking could not give them. If you have something starting, that conversation is more useful now than after the fencing comes down.