Photography

A long-exposure photograph at night: the word FUTURE drawn in 3D blue and pink light hovering above a wet courtyard, its perfect mirror image reflected in a puddle on the asphalt below. The surrounding industrial building, doors, and a single magenta lamp are reflected alongside it.
From Making Future Magic , BERG with Dentsu London, 2010. Long-exposure photograph of an iPad screen drawing 3D type, with its reflection in a courtyard puddle.

Photography has been a parallel practice for almost as long as I can remember. Some of it is project work, like the long-exposure rigs to make wireless networks visible. Most of it is the ongoing record of what I notice: people using phones, signs and screens in public space, cities and architecture, everyday life in the places I travel to.

The working method has been settled since around 2002, when I wrote a short artist’s statement for an exhibition: “As a filmmaker, used to working with images changing 25 frames every second, I have been using digital photography as a narrative medium, taking sequences of photographs to suggest movement, place, stories, journeys and discovery. I never use the viewfinder. The screen allows for photographic framing and composition so that the camera rarely gets in the way of the experience.” What’s accumulated since is a long daily diary, mostly unannotated. The photographs are nearly all titled with nothing but the timestamp they were taken at.

Photographs as a way of seeing technology

Several of the projects below are photographic in their method as well as their documentation. The camera is used to render something that would otherwise be invisible: a radio field, a satellite signal, the spatial volume of a room reconstructed from stills.

A long-exposure photograph at night: a brick courtyard between buildings in Oslo, snowy ground, a yellow-lit window. Filling the frame are two enormous walls of vertical blue-white light bands, the WiFi field in the courtyard rendered as a 3D topography by the four-metre LED rod walked through it.
From Light Painting WiFi , with Einar Sneve Martinussen and Jørn Knutsen at AHO, Oslo, winter 2010–2011.

Light Painting WiFi and Ghost in the Field are long-exposure photographs of an instrumented probe walked through a wireless field.

A small black RFID reader chip on a stack of pale wooden blocks. Floating above it in space, traced through long exposure, an arc of bright neon-green dots — the read-zone of the RFID antenna mapped as a 3D form by an LED probe waved through it.
From Ghost in the Field , with Einar Sneve Martinussen and Jack Schulze, AHO, 2009. The RFID read-volume of an antenna chip drawn in green light by a long-exposure probe.
A tabletop assemblage in pale daylight: two Nokia keypad phones on small perspex stands, surrounded by a Fischli-and-Weiss-style mechanical rig of acrylic stages, blue spheres balanced on rods, brass weights on pulleys, and a paperclip-loaded plate. The rig captures the moment two phones touch each other through proximity.
From Nearness , with Jack Schulze, BERG, 2009. The mechanical rig that triggers a chain reaction the moment two phones come into NFC range of each other.

Internet Machine uses photogrammetry, three-hundred and ninety-five high-resolution stills turned into navigable 3D scenes, to make a film inside one of the world’s largest data centres.

A stark white industrial hall inside a data centre. Polished tile floor, white plinths arranged in a grid, a long ribbon of fluorescent light running the length of the ceiling, blue numeric room signs (9 ten, eleven twelve, one-forty) hanging from the structure. Empty of people.
From Internet Machine , Telefónica data centre, Alcalá, Spain, 2014.
A long concrete utility tunnel inside the data centre. Bare grey walls and floor, vanishing into perspective. Overhead, dense cable trays carry bundles of red, orange and green data and power cables along the entire length of the corridor.
The service corridor underneath the same data centre, Alcalá, 2014.

People using phones

A line of people stand against a railing on the Shanghai Bund at night, every one of them holding up a phone. Across the dark Huangpu river, the Oriental Pearl Tower glows hot pink and the towers of Pudong are lit in saturated colour. A street lamp at left, a stone-clad guardhouse at right, the pavement empty in the foreground except for one running child.
The Bund, Shanghai. Tourists photographing Pudong at night.

A documentary set started in 2008. Almost two thousand photographs on Flickr at People using phones. The interest is partly anthropological: what people actually do with phones in public, hands and posture and where the device sits in the body’s attention. And partly about the changing visual environment of streets, cafés, transit.

A young woman with red hair sits by the window of a London DLR train in late afternoon sun, looking down at her phone. Through the window behind her, the white domes of the O2 arena and the towers of Canary Wharf rise against a soft sky of broken cloud. Her own reflection floats faintly in the glass.
London DLR towards the O2.
In a darkened gallery, a young woman with hoop earrings holds her phone up to photograph a wall of vintage cathode-ray television screens, all glowing in cool blue and green bands of test-pattern light. The phone's display reflects a small bright copy of the screens she is photographing.
Photographing a wall of vintage CRTs in a gallery.
A close, shallow-depth-of-field photograph of two strangers on a metro train. A woman in a black puffer coat holds a white iPad in one hand and a small phone in the other, both screens lit. Across from her, partly out of focus, a young man in a coat looks down at his own phone.
Two strangers, two phones, one iPad, on a metro train.

The set continues in a 2024 video work titled Blueface on the same subject. The early phone-as-thing photographs in Touch and Photos of touch-based interfaces are this set’s research-context cousins. The longer essay People using phones reads the project across the eighteen years of work.

Effects of the network

The counter of a French café in soft daylight. Behind it, a chalkboard menu with hand-lettered Classiques, Les Panini and Suggestions sections. To one side, a wire basket of oranges and lemons; to the other, a calla lily and the blurred shoulder of a woman in a scarf. Taped to the front of the till, a printed A4 sign in plain capital letters reading NEW WIFI.
A printed NEW WIFI sign on a Paris café till, alongside the chalkboard menu.
A photograph at dusk of an LED dot-matrix shop sign reading MOBILE PHONE UNLOCKING REPAIRS ACCESSORIES HERE in flickering blue, green and red dots. Behind it, soft orange and red bokeh of street lights along a row of buildings.
An LED matrix shop sign at dusk: Mobile Phone Unlocking, Repairs, Accessories Here .

Digital signage, infrastructure markings, cable-runs, hand-drawn QR codes, antennas grafted onto buildings, payment-terminal hardware, RFID stickers, WiFi here printouts, screens in shop windows, machine-readable surfaces. 206 photographs in the Effects of the network set on Flickr, made between 2006 and 2015 across London, Brussels, Oslo, Italy, Manila, with one-offs from Aleppo, Doha, Yangon, Bagan, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Zambia. About half of the set is WiFi signage. The earlier Public markup piece is the conceptual root of all this; Inhabiting Advertising below is the analogue sibling.

Inhabiting Advertising

A blue circular pedestrian-crossing sign showing a white stick figure of a man holding the hand of a small child. Someone has drawn on it in black marker: a punk mohawk on the man's head, a sketched tie around his neck, and a small bow-clip in the girl's hair.
From Pedestrian Subversion , Ljubljana, February 2005.

For about ten years, between 2004 and 2015, I kept photographing what people do to advertising and signage in public space. The pedestrian-crossing figure with a mohawk drawn on him in Ljubljana. The Stick no bills sign in Dubai covered in bills. A torn poster in London revealing three older posters underneath. The painted facades in Tirana where a mayor decided to override commercial dereliction with civic colour. A mattress wired into a fence in rural Italy, doing the work that a sign would have done. I called it, in my head at least, Inhabiting Advertising.

A triangular yield-style traffic sign with a stylised black pedestrian figure. Someone has stuck a small black-and-white sticker over the head: a wavy Munch-mask, two black holes for eyes, like a small ghost face on a sign that has stopped meaning what it once meant.
Pedestrian ghost, Ljubljana, 20 February 2005.

It started in Ljubljana, in February 2005. Eleven photographs over four days of pedestrian-crossing pictograms that someone had been adding to with a marker pen. A mohawk. A baby with horns. Slovenian words written backwards on a signpost. Once you see this, you cannot stop seeing it: the standard international pictogram, supposed to be neutral and unauthored, is everywhere quietly being completed by hand.

A polished metal sign with three black pictograms on a brushed cream ground: a standing figure with a cane, a seated figure leaning forward, and a pregnant woman in profile. Mounted to a wood-grain wall panel by four silver studs.
From The Adventures of Helvetica Man , November 2004, the earliest documented specimen.

Two albums catch the typological side of the project. The Adventures of Helvetica Man is a hundred-photograph collection of the AIGA pedestrian pictogram in its many roles. Helvetica Hand applies the same approach to the press here / push / pull / do not touch hand pictogram. They were field notebooks for someone trying to extend the same visual language into the new digital surfaces of RFID and touch. The 2005 essay Graphic language for touch is part of the same project.

A weathered cream-stucco wall in Dubai. To the upper-left two stacked enamel signs in red: a skull-and-crossbones DANGER warning in Arabic and English, and below it a No Admittance pictogram of a barred figure. To the right, painted directly on the wall in large blue stencilled capitals: STICK NO BILLS, with its Arabic equivalent above.
Dubai, July 2005. The project’s signature joke.

This was a body of work that travelled. Ljubljana 2005, where it started. Dubai 2005, where I made 137 photographs of the visual contradictions of a newly-rich Gulf city. Tirana 2009, two days walking block by block recording the painted-facade programme that mayor Edi Rama had begun to override communist-era dereliction with civic colour. Rural Italy across three years, where farmers fence their fields with mattresses, doors, and rebar. And throughout, Oslo and London. Stygge Oslo (“ugly Oslo”) is a long visual complaint about my home city’s public realm. The Flickr advertising tag has 658 photographs and is the wider reservoir.

The visual environment of the city keeps being finished and re-finished, long after the designer signs off, by the people who use it, by the weather, by time. A pedestrian-crossing sign that has been mohawked by a teenager becomes a collaboration with the AIGA. As a designer of icons and interfaces, this is the photographic record I keep going back to. Inhabiting Advertising is the longer piece.

Cities, architecture, everyday life

The continuous body of travel and place photography that runs underneath the project work.

A winter night view across a snowy public plaza in Oslo's Bjørvika quarter. A small figure walks alone across the foreground in a high-vis jacket. Behind them, a long industrial brick warehouse with a mural along its side, and beyond that the lit Barcode buildings and the white slope of the Opera House rising into a heavy grey sky. Two construction cranes lit at the top.
Oslo, Bjørvika at night.
A wide desert plain at sunset. In the middle distance, a tiny petrol-station-style canopy with a single car parked beneath it and one figure standing beside. Behind, a long jagged ridge of mountains lit deep red-orange by the setting sun. Above, a band of soft pink cloud across a pale sky.
Namibia, last light over the Naukluft mountains.
An enormous, almost empty white-tiled metro concourse in Tokyo. Spotlights on a high ceiling pick out a bright blue overhead duct running the length of the hall. In the centre stands a small Paw Patrol promotional kiosk, its bright cartoon graphics dwarfed by the scale of the architecture around it.
An empty Tokyo concourse and a Paw Patrol kiosk.
A vertical photograph of a Tokyo street: floor-to-ceiling neon Japanese signage in red and green at the top, below it a printed wall of cartoon-bordered Yodobashi Gachapon Jungle ads, and at street level a bank of clear plastic capsule-toy vending machines. One man in a beige shirt stands quietly in front of them looking at his phone.
Yodobashi Gachapon Jungle, Tokyo.
A motion-blurred night photograph from inside a moving vehicle on a Tokyo street. A scooter rider in dark jacket rides ahead, slightly in focus. Around them the city smears into streaks of electric blue, red and orange — neon signs and shopfronts and tail-lights drawn out by speed. A wing mirror at the bottom edge of the frame.
Tokyo at speed.

A partial atlas of the Flickr sets, mostly from the BERG and post-BERG decade:

Project and studio documentation

A working part of the practice has always been documenting the work itself, the studio, the people. A visual history of BERG is the largest of these, 2,204 photos covering Schulze & Webb, BERG, and BERG Cloud across the studio’s life. The dedicated project sets (Internet Machine, Ghost in the Field, Light Painting WiFi, Light Painting WiFi WIP, Nearness, Robot Readable World, Satellite Lamps, Talk to Me at MoMA) sit alongside the films and articles, and often contain the working photographs that didn’t make the final cut.

On this site

In books and on disk

The full archive runs to about 450,000 unique photographs across thirty years, sitting on disk in catalogued form. The complete public set is at flickr.com/photos/timo. The Selected images set is the cut (2,514 favourites, almost all titled only with the timestamp they were taken at), and the longer essay Selected Images reads that cut as a coherent body of work. For a specific image, set, or print enquiry, drop me a line.