Paul Scherrer Institute, Villigen, Switzerland

PSI is one of the largest and most diverse natural science research institutes in Europe. Over more than ten years, we returned to PSI repeatedly: for annual reports, brochures and the institute’s own magazine, where this climate research photography appeared.

This series was made for a gallery in the magazine 5232, in an issue on ice and clouds: how PSI researchers trace what energy production does to the atmosphere. Their tools are unusual objects. A filter strip from the mobile smog laboratory, with a dark spot for every sample of air drawn through it. A probe flange in the smog chamber, where UV light behind thin plastic walls recreates the air over cities like Delhi or Beijing. The aluminium barrel of an ice core drill, which cuts cylinders out of glaciers that still hold the atmosphere of past centuries. And smoke, the visible part of what all these instruments measure. Our PSI climate research photography shows the instruments as objects, isolated and exact, so that they carry the story rather than the lab around them.

Part of our Still Life work.