Reconnaissance
We arrive days before we shoot. Tide tables, sun angles, and a great deal of walking. By the time a camera comes out of the bag we already know where we will be standing and at what hour.
(01) — The practice
A practicemade of distanceand waiting
Coast Road · Northern Headlands
Morph photographs land at the point where it stops being scenery and starts being geology.
Two of us, working since 2014 out of a yard in Bermondsey. We go back to the same coastlines, the same ice and the same open ground, sometimes for years, until the weather finally does the thing we went there for. Nothing in the archive was found on a first visit.
- Founded
- 2014
- Base
- London SE1
- Disciplines
- Landscape, aerial
- Editions
- Twelve per work
Field record
Two cameras on the same ridge, four hours before anything happened. Most of this work is standing still in the cold with the shutter cable already in your hand.
(02) — Position
We are not in the business of nice weather
The pictures that last are almost never the pretty ones. A flat pink sea at dawn is a gift, but it is the six greys of a fogged-out beach that people come back to and keep looking at. So we shoot for structure first: where the ground goes, what the water is doing to it, and how far you can see before the air takes over.
That means most trips fail, and we plan for it. A commission is quoted with the failures priced in, because a schedule that assumes the light will cooperate is a schedule that produces stock photography.
What we hand over is a small number of frames that are genuinely about something, and a print that will still be worth hanging in thirty years.
(03) — Method
The wait
Most of the work is waiting for four minutes of light that may never arrive. Alpenglow, 06:14 took eleven days on a headland in Lofoten. We came home with one frame and it was the right one.
One frame
No brackets, no composites, no borrowed skies. What the negative holds is what the print holds. It keeps the archive honest, and it means a collector is buying a moment rather than an assembly.
The print
Every edition is drum-scanned, printed on cotton rag at up to 1.4 metres, signed, numbered to twelve, and shipped flat in a crate built for it. The print is the work. Everything before it is preparation.
(04) — In the field
Notebook
"Fogbank held from four until nine. We shot the last eleven minutes and none of the first four hours."
— field log, Lofoten
(05) — Selected
Exhibitions and commissions
2025Cold ArchiveExhibitionKunsthal, Rotterdam
2024EdgewaterFestivalFormat, Derby
2024Coastal surveyCommissionNorwegian Coastal Administration
2023From AboveExhibitionAperture, New York
2022Distance StudyGroup showThe Photographers Gallery, London
2021Shoreline programmeCommissionNational Trust
(06) — Next
Start a project
Contact the studio
Commissions, print sales, licensing and exhibition loans. Tell us where you want us to stand and we will tell you honestly what it takes to get the picture.
