Before shooting for luxury brands, I spent years in the field — following an 8,000-kilometre journey across China, documenting communities in Laos living with the unspoken legacy of war, making portraits of the White Karen people in the mountains of northern Thailand, and recording the slow disappearance of coastal land in the Mekong Delta. These projects were made from necessity, a need to look carefully at the world and find what is genuinely worth photographing.

That practice never left. It is the foundation of everything I shoot — whether the subject is a La Mer serum, a piece of Liberty London fine jewellery, or a founder at her workbench. The eye is always the same. Only the subject changes.