Interview

I come from a town called Guildford about 50 km south of London. After studying philosophy and politics at university in the UK, I travelled a bit. I met a Danish girl while working as a ski-bum in France – I followed her to Denmark and haven’t looked back since. That was in 2004. I broke up with the girl after a few years, found another Danish girl. And now I’ve got the kids, the house, the whole package. I was actually a cook when I first came here. But I became interested in graphic design, I taught myself some stuff and ended up working for designer and artist Henrik Vibskov. I worked for him for eight years, and during that time I picked up a camera and started playing. Before I knew it, I was the photographer as well as the graphic designer.

I love going behind the scenes and seeing things that other people don’t get to see. I feel extremely lucky to be able to do that. I am particularly attracted to the industrial and scientific work, because here I get to explore the insane solutions that human beings come up with to solve problems. Like building huge infrastructures to provide cities with power or entire continents with pork. Or massive machines that can analyse the smallest particles in the universe to help us understand what life is all about. The architectural stuff I do tends to be a bit quirkier. But I still take the same approach towards the subject matter. I am not a conventional architecture photographer. I am more interested in finding the work of eccentric, half-forgotten architects who were doing things out of the box and showing their work in new ways. Like the work of Jacques Labro in Avoriaz or César Manrique in Lanzarote. A few years ago, I also started to write as I felt it gave my images some extra context. I want people get a feeling for what I experience when I visit these places, and add some information that I think makes the pictures more interesting.

These days I'm lucky enough to get commercial and editorial work that I find very interesting. But I still spend a lot of time researching places to visit for personal projects. It can take a lot of work to get into some places. Sometimes I reach a wall, where I get the wrong person who just doesn’t understand, what I am trying to do. Or why it could also be an interesting project for them. But like I said, I have gotten quite good at it over the years.

One of the easiest places I got access to, was actually the place I thought would be the hardest: the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. When I was just starting, I planned a trip there, just to take their regular tourist visit. But I also sent an email to the press office asking if there was anything, I could see that the other tourists don’t get to see. To my surprise they offered me a private guided tour. That afternoon, my guide was an engineer who had worked on the LHC for about 30 years. We stayed in contact, and I’ve been back again twice. The last time CERN commissioned me to photograph their facilities, which was pretty much a dream job for me.

One that really stands out was photographing the building of the Maersk Triple E in South Korea, the biggest container ship in the world, for Wired Magazine. That was just epic, seeing these huge blocks of ship being lifted around and put together like bits of Lego. I also love the series I did about the Danish Crown slaughterhouse in Horsens, one of the biggest slaughterhouses in the world.

Visually it was incredible to see all this pink flesh in a very systemised infrastructure. There is this dark humour, I like about it. As someone who is very into food, there’s a very interesting debate to be had about the way we consume this kind of food. I have actually sold quite a few prints from that series in a very large size, and I get quite a kick out of thinking someone has that hanging above their fireplace – or bed.

And of course making The Art of Impossible book!

I remember Bang & Olufsen from my childhood – my granddad had a B&O TV – and it has always been on my radar as a really interesting company. When I moved to Denmark, I became even more aware of it – it was obviously the kind of company I would like to explore. Through a friend, I arranged a meeting with someone very senior in the company and pitched them the idea of doing this book. To my surprise they went for it all the way. I was really allowed to make the book that I wanted, with very little interference.