NEWS



When AngloAmerican commissioned me to photograph its nickel smelting operation at Codemin in Brazil, my trip included a visit to the eucalyptus plantation at Horto Aranha, which provides sustainable wood chip material for the smelting plant. Less obviously dramatic than the rivers of molten metal that emerged from Codemin, this image has an ethereal quality that is a consequence of fantastic natural light and a sense of near-infinite distance created by the avenues of slender trees.


At Four Elms Fruit Farm in Devon, the Smedley family have been maintaining productive woodland in a sustainable way since the 1960s. They grow 14 varieties of apple on the 70-acre site, producing a range of seven award-winning fruit juices. Photographing the orchards at critical moments during the growing cycle brings to mind the words of author Pete Brown, who writes in his definitive work, The Apple Orchard: “An orchard is not a field. It's not a forest or a copse. It couldn't occur naturally; it's definitely cultivated. It demonstrates that man and nature together can – just occasionally – create something more beautiful and (literally) more fruitful than either could alone.”


Two days spent on Centrica’s principal gas rig in Morecambe Bay resulted in a huge library of images. Returning to this photo, I can clearly see the influence of photographers such as Edward Burtynsky and Andreas Gursky on my development. Like them I’m drawn to situations in which man-made objects cease to be ‘things’ and become landscapes in their own right, with powerful patterns and textures emerging from the most unlikely sources.

Commissioned to produce portraits for a campaign communicating National Grid’s Employee Value Proposition (EVP), I focused on individuals and used the UK’s power infrastructure as the backdrop to an altogether more accessible group of subjects. The campaign aims to inspire and inform staff through three key themes: the organisation’s presence, its people and its opportunity to grow. In practical terms, a rigorous commissioning and briefing process required portraits that could be cropped for a variety of applications. When you’re operating within such demanding format constraints, shooting in Hyde Park can be almost as challenging as working in the North Sea!


This image was taken on location at a dry dock in Alabama. My objective was to illustrate the resilience of Tanfield’s aerial work platforms in the most rugged working environments. For me, however, the resilience of the workers toiling beneath the ship’s hull comes across just as strongly, especially considering the enormous propeller that lurks below…

People working on rather less imposing seafaring vessels formed the focal point of a recent project at the Boat Building Academy in Lyme Regis. The Academy offers the widest range of hands-on boat building training in the world, and I charted the students’ journey from theory and planning to the painstaking business of construction. By getting close to the action and following the process of design and building to completion, I gained a real sense of the enormous commitment required to create a boat by hand – and of the thrill of launching a lovingly constructed vessel onto open water.
