Bradley Skaggs has been working with light his whole life.
In high school, it was a darkroom in the basement and a subscription to National Geographic. The goal was to shoot for them. Then architecture school happened, and the camera went mostly quiet, though not completely. After college, he continued to shoot architecture while living in Europe, the same questions underneath: how does light fall on form, what does it reveal, what does it conceal?
When Skaggs took on Diptyque's first global e-commerce site and the launch of 34 Boulevard Saint Germain, the assets that came with the brief didn’t align with the work Skaggs was creating. So he shot what was needed. That was the beginning of shooting product. Eight years of shooting for Diptyque followed, then Charlotte Tilbury, as the studio built a photography operation because the work demanded it.
The background in architecture turned out to matter more than expected. Product photography and architectural photography are similar problems at different scales: three-dimensional form, light behaving on surfaces and a composition that either makes the object legible or doesn't.
Today, Skaggs Photo continues to shoot product and hero images the same way the studio builds strategy: starting with what the product actually is, and staying in the process long enough for it to show you how it wants to be seen.