For our industrial photography commission for Ambrian Energy, working through Hamburg agency Syndicate Design, the brief was clear from the start: build a scalable image library that reflects the brand’s core message, WE KEEP YOU MOVING, across people, architecture, and operational detail.

Following Ambrian Energy’s brand relaunch, the task was to create a content library covering the full range of the company’s visual identity. Portraits of employees and management. Architecture and infrastructure at scale. Technical detail and operational environments across two cities.

The production spanned sites in Bremen and Hamburg, with both day and night shooting conditions and drone coverage. Office situations in Hamburg were photographed alongside industrial locations in Bremen. Casting was handled by WE LOVE Artbuying in Hamburg, who sourced talent for the people photography across both locations. One practical requirement shaped the brief from the start: parts of the production involved working at height. Everyone on set needed to be comfortable with it.

Industrial photography at this level is not primarily a visual challenge. It is a logistical and safety challenge first. A significant part of the production took place in EX zones: classified areas where the risk of explosive atmospheres requires specific equipment, pre-approved protocols, and documented experience.

This is work we know. Our pitch to Syndicate Design was direct: we have worked in these environments before, we understand the protocols, and you can rely on us to handle the safety requirements without it becoming your problem on set. The access planning, the equipment checks, the coordination with site safety officers: this is part of the production, not an obstacle to it.

Bremen has a reputation for weather, and it earned it. The first production was originally planned for September. The forecast looked promising, but the weather did not cooperate, and we postponed. October came, and the blue sky we had hoped for largely stayed away. We had to make a decision: wait, or work with what we had.

We worked with what we had. Overcast light flattens harsh shadows, simplifies complex environments, and draws out the material quality of metal and concrete in ways direct sun rarely does. We adapted the approach and made the most of the conditions. The images hold.

For the follow-up production, scheduled specifically for sunnier weather and completed in July, the opposite challenge presented itself: how to bring the new material stylistically in line with what had already been shot. The look had been defined under grey skies. Matching it in post under different light conditions took care and added work, but the result is consistent across both shoots. You would not know they happened months apart.

The portrait side of this production required the most precise direction. Creating controlled shooting situations within a working industrial environment, without disrupting operations and without compromising safety, is a specific skill. It requires reading the space quickly, understanding how the environment works, and finding the compositions that feel natural rather than staged.

Hamburg was a different world. No EX zones, no hard hats: a clean office environment with its own set of demands. The visual language still had to connect with what we had shot in Bremen. Management portraits were produced across both locations, which meant the look and direction needed to hold equally well in an industrial setting and a corporate one. It did.

Ambrian Energy’s brand message centres on the people behind the operation. That shaped every casting and direction decision. What made this production particularly enjoyable was the crew: Syndicate Design were present throughout, the talent committed fully to every situation, and the work of the hair and make-up artist and stylist showed in every frame. A well-prepared set makes the difference, and this one was.

One of the things that defines a well-run production is how little the client needs to worry about it.

We are glad to share what we know. That is part of what a production like this offers: the chance to bring experience into a complex environment, handle the unexpected, and keep things moving for everyone involved. This one was intense, as these productions always are. But it was also one of those jobs where everything clicked: the planning, the crew, the collaboration with Syndicate Design. When a production runs well, you feel it. This one did.

The Ambrian Energy image library is built to grow. There is more material where this came from.

ETERNAL ICE began as a personal project and grew into something we have returned to over many years. The Swiss glaciers offered a silence that was nothing like quiet. It was the presence of geological time, of ice that had accumulated over millennia and is now, within a single human lifetime, receding faster than it ever has before. For photographers who spend most of their working lives in industrial environments, that stillness was not peaceful. It was confrontational. These images are our response to that confrontation.

Switzerland has lost more than half of its glacier volume since the mid-nineteenth century. The pace of that loss has accelerated sharply in recent decades. Between 2000 and 2024 alone, Swiss glaciers lost close to 40% of their remaining volume and the pace continues to accelerate.

For ETERNAL ICE, we chose four glaciers that each tell a different part of this story:

The approach to Trift is long and demanding. A hike that earns you the view. By the time you arrive, the scale of what you are looking at has already been set by the effort of getting there.

What struck us most was the glacier’s tongue, where the melting is most visible and most dramatic. The lake below it did not exist before 2002. It formed within a single generation, as the lower section of the glacier retreated and meltwater filled the space it left behind. Standing at its edge, that timeline is difficult to absorb. The water is cold and entirely new.

The Trift sits in the Susten-Grimsel region and has become one of the most cited examples of glacial retreat in Switzerland – losing metres of ice thickness each year, and frequently referenced in scientific studies and media as a measure of what is happening across the Alps. The suspension bridge above the lake, the mountain hut on the ridge: structures built around a glacier that was already leaving. The landscape has reorganised itself around the loss. That reorganisation is not recovery.

The Bernina Pass, at 2’328 metres, connects two worlds: the Engadin and the Italian-speaking Val Poschiavo. We have crossed it many times. It is one of those thresholds where the landscape shifts visibly – in light, in vegetation, in the quality of the air. And it is from this vantage point that the glaciers of the Bernina massif reveal themselves most fully.

Standing here, the documentation of glacial retreat becomes physical. The rock exposed by receding ice is raw and recent-looking. We were drawn to the tension between the permanence of the mountain and the impermanence of what covers it – and to the way the pass itself, unchanged for centuries as a crossing point, now frames a landscape that is quietly, irreversibly different from the one travellers would have seen a hundred years ago.

The Tschierva sits in the Val Roseg and can be reached only on foot. That distance is part of what the images hold.

At its peak during the Little Ice Age, around 1860, the Tschierva and the neighbouring Roseg glacier formed a single, unbroken stream of ice. By the early twentieth century, they had already begun to separate. Today, the volume of ice lost across Graubünden since that high point is roughly equivalent to the entire contents of Lake Zurich.

For the Tschierva image, we did not set out to document the glacier in a conventional sense. The photograph is a constructed landscape, made across a flight by helicopter: several viewpoints were combined and the perspective deliberately manipulated to bring the ice masses closer while pushing the surrounding rock faces and mountain flanks into the background. The aerial approach was not the most climate-neutral choice for a project about glacial loss. It is a contradiction we are aware of. The perspective it opened, and what it revealed about the scale of what is disappearing, felt worth the honesty of naming it. The result is a glacier that feels both present and already distant, a place that, as retreat continues, will soon exist only as a memory of this form.

The Rhône glacier is the most visited in Switzerland, and the most visibly tended. Each summer, sections of the ice are wrapped in thick white insulating blankets to slow the melt around the glacier’s famous ice grotto – a cave that has to be re-excavated every year as the ice shifts and thins. The family who has managed this site for generations has watched their glacier, and their livelihood, change beyond recognition.

On the ground, the blankets feel like an act of devotion as much as logistics. Up close, they are torn and weathered, held down against wind and weather. Every year, the grotto moves a little further from the souvenir shop. Every year, it becomes a little shallower. It is only from the air that the full extent of this gesture becomes visible.

From above, the blankets are small. The glacier is smaller still. The aerial photograph that opens this journal entry was made in 2021 by drone, for a collaborative mailing with Keller Maurer Design. From altitude, the white insulating blankets appear as pale patches against the grey-blue of the ice. What is intimate and almost tender on the ground becomes, from the air, a pattern. A symptom. Something that can be seen all at once.

The full mailing is available to view here.

We are photographers, not scientists or campaigners. Photography is how we pay attention, and ETERNAL ICE is an act of sustained attention to something that is changing faster than most of us are prepared to reckon with.

The images in this series are not illustrations for a predetermined message. Each one required a specific decision: where to stand, what light to work in, what to include and what to leave out. That process of decision-making is, for us, a form of witness. The glaciers were there long before our cameras. The photographs are a record of the encounter.

The ETERNAL ICE series has been shown in the following contemporary art contexts:

ETERNAL ICE
VOLTA contemporary art week, Basel, Switzerland
Group Exhibition, June 16–21, 2014

THE EYE OF THE VALLEY
Château Papillon des Arts, St. Moritz, Switzerland
Group Exhibition, November 21–24, 2013

SHAPE THE SCAPE
Widmer+Theodoridis contemporary, Zurich, Switzerland
Group Exhibition, Aug 29–Oct 19, 2013

THE EYE OF THE VALLEY
Gallery Idea Fixa, Basel, Switzerland
Group Exhibition, October 12–24, 2013

Each spread carried a title, a GPS coordinate, and a short text. Not captions. Observations. The kind of thing you say after a long day on set, when the light is gone and the cameras are packed and someone asks how it went.

The magenta that could have dyed an entire photo team, socks included, at the Clariant plant in Frankfurt. The night shift on runway 14-32 at Zurich Airport, where a hundred machines had to resurface the tarmac and be gone before the first flight at 7am. The pump station at Zmutt, reached on foot through the high alpine landscape in sub-zero temperatures, equipment on our backs, the view reaching all the way to the Matterhorn at the top.

And South Korea. We sat on a plastic stool at the harbour and scanned the sea for a ship we were supposed to photograph. The ship did not come. We found it in port, photographed it there, and brought it out to sea in postproduction. We left the stool behind. For the colleagues.

The magazine was designed by Keller Maurer Design. It went out to agencies, clients, and contacts: a physical object in an increasingly digital world. Something you could hold, leaf through, set down on a desk.

The response was overwhelmingly positive. It still is. We’ve got a few copies left, and when someone receives one today, the reaction is the same as it was in 2016.

Ten years later, the spirit of ON LOCATION is what you are reading now.

The locations have changed. A compressor foundry in China. The Ceneri Base Tunnel, deep inside the Ticino mountains. A portrait studio built from scratch in a glass-fronted conference room in Hamburg, with models, stylist, hair and make-up, wardrobe on a rack in the corner, the days before we had been inside an EX zone in Bremen. These are not the same kind of job. But they come from the same curiosity, and they require the same commitment to getting it right.

Over more than twenty years, the work has grown in directions we did not always anticipate. Industrial photography was where we built our reputation, and it remains central to what we do. But so does the portrait session that needs a full crew. The annual report shot across three cities. The CGI integration that makes a physical build unnecessary. The personal project that takes us somewhere no client brief would have sent us. The postproduction that ties it all together.

What has not changed is this: The final image rarely shows what it took to make it. That is true whether the location is a restricted pipeline zone or a carefully lit studio. The decisions, the logistics, the moments before the first frame. That is what this journal is for.

The last page of ON LOCATION carried a line that still holds: When it is too loud, too uncomfortable, too far away for most people – that is where you will find us.

Though we should add: We are equally at home when it is clean, bright, and perfectly safe. The location has never been the point. The curiosity has.

In front of the gate, a small group of alpacas grazed undisturbed. Behind it, a man was working. He turned out to be the caretaker of the site, and he became the first in a chain of connections that would eventually open the doors of Switzerland’s first and only crude-oil thermal power station to us.

The Chavalon power plant sits at 825 metres above Vouvry in the Swiss canton of Valais. Constructed in the late 1950s using crude oil from the neighbouring refinery, it was strategically positioned above the valley to minimise emissions in the settlements below. It generated its first kilowatt-hour in September 1965. By 1999, ageing technology and declining profitability had led to its closure. Plans to build a gas-fired replacement were abandoned due to environmental regulations and local objections, leaving the site unchanged, silent, in a kind of suspended state.

The facility consists of the main power station building and a 120-metre chimney. Four reduced-size cooling towers limit the visual impact on the landscape. The purpose-built workers’ housing nearby still stands.

The caretaker had worked at the plant during its operating years. He knew who to call. Through him, we made contact with the people responsible for the site and, after further discussions, were given access. What we found inside was extraordinary.

We stood in the 45-metre high furnaces where 16 tons of heavy fuel burned per hour at temperatures reaching 1500°C. Scattered files, dusty machine parts, tools left mid-task: the place had the feel of something interrupted rather than dismantled. The combustion chamber, heart of the plant, had the proportions of a cathedral. The control room resembled the command bridge of a spacecraft. Every room revealed something about what it meant to operate a machine of this scale.

The caretaker also connected us with former employees of the plant. Most of them still had their work clothes at home. They agreed to put them on again and be photographed.

These portraits sit alongside the architectural images in the series not as documentary evidence but as something closer to memory made visible. The people we met carried the pride of that work with them, independent of how history has since judged the plant’s environmental record. That tension is part of what CHAVALON is about.

All of us, as consumers and producers, are dependent on electricity. As long as our society is not willing or able to reduce power consumption, it must somehow produce it. Public perception of this issue shifted considerably during the years we worked on the project. CHAVALON marks a specific moment in that shift – an end point, and perhaps the beginning of a different chapter.

When we showed CHAVALON at Widmer+Theodoridis contemporary in Zurich, half the village of Vouvry made the trip to see it. The city was at its best that day. We served wine from the region, and the former workers stood in front of their own portraits with a pride that needed no explanation.

Since our initial work on CHAVALON, electricity demand has continued to rise. Electric vehicles, expanding digital infrastructure, energy-intensive consumption at every level: The questions the project poses have not become less urgent. If anything, the opposite.

The images were made at a specific moment in an ongoing story. They remain there, fixed in that moment, while the story continues around them. The site has since been designated as a rocket and satellite engine testing facility. Its provisional state continues in a new form.

CHAVALON has been shown in international contemporary art contexts:

BACK TO ATHENS 9
widmertheodoridis, Athens, Greece
Group Exhibition, June 29–July 3, 2022

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH
widmertheodoridis, Eschlikon, Switzerland
Group Exhibition, May 13–July 1, 2017

ICONIC GEOGRAPHY, WORKS 2005–2015
Anteprima D’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy
Solo Exhibition, Feb 25–May 5, 2015

CHAVALON
Widmer+Theodoridis contemporary, Zurich, Switzerland
Solo Exhibition, Aug 26–Oct 8, 2011

CHAVALON
VOLTA contemporary art week, Basel, Switzerland
Group Exhibition, June 13–18, 2011

The Mojave facility is not open to the public, and it is not a place that extends casual invitations. Before a single image could be made, we spent months in research: identifying the right contacts, understanding the legal framework around commercial photography on a restricted site, and working through the agreements required by the then-owner, Mike Potter.

Potter, who has since passed away, was an extraordinary figure. He had an intimate knowledge of every aircraft on the field and had personally piloted some of them to their final resting place. Once the paperwork was settled, he guided us across the airfield himself, his Labrador alongside him, telling stories that no archive could hold. His hospitality was as unexpected as it was generous. We have worked in restricted industrial environments before, but rarely with that kind of openness.

The Mojave Desert is not a comfortable working environment. The heat was relentless, and the ground between the aircraft was territory we shared with rattlesnakes, a detail that sharpens your attention in ways that are difficult to replicate in a studio. Movement across the field required constant care, not only because of the conditions underfoot, but because of the scale and fragility of the machines themselves.

Once, a desert windstorm rolled in without much warning. The dust and the light changed within minutes. One of the images from that day carries the storm visibly: the atmosphere is different, the quality of the air has shifted. We did not plan it. We worked with it.

The agreement with the facility included certain restrictions on what could be photographed. Some areas and identifying details were off-limits. We respected that without reservation: access of this kind is rare, and the relationship that makes it possible is worth protecting.

But there were also decisions that were entirely our own. Not everything that was visually striking served the project. Certain images were made and then set aside, not because of any contractual constraint, but because they pulled the work in a direction we did not want to go. DECOMMISSIONED is not documentation in the journalistic sense. It is a constructed view of a particular condition. That required choices.

The 24 motifs that make up the final series represent what remained after that editing process: images where the aircraft function as something more than themselves, where the industrial and the elegiac coexist without either cancelling the other out.

We photographed these aircraft as a metaphor for a system’s dependence on oil and global mobility, a way of making an abstract vulnerability visible. International air traffic had grown exponentially in the decades before this project. The concept of Peak Oil cast a long shadow. These machines, stripped of their instruments and engines, transformed into spare-part stores, made that shadow physical.

Sixteen years later, the project reads differently. What felt speculative in 2010 now feels like an early observation of a shift that has become unmistakable. The questions around sustainability, industrial cycles, and the limits of the global economy have not resolved. They have intensified. DECOMMISSIONED has gained weight rather than lost it.

What stays with us from Mojave is the silence between the aircraft, the scale of machines that once crossed continents now standing entirely still, and the realization that every industrial cycle reaches its end. The only question, then as now, is what we choose to see in that moment and whether we choose to look at all.

DECOMMISSIONED has been shown in international contemporary art contexts:

ICONIC GEOGRAPHY, WORKS 2005–2015
Anteprima D’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy
Solo Exhibition, Feb 25–May 5, 2015

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH
widmertheodoridis, Eschlikon, Switzerland
Group Exhibition, May 13–July 1, 2017

DECOMMISSIONED
Widmer+Theodoridis contemporary, Zurich, Switzerland
Solo Exhibition, Oct 29–Dec 24, 2010