Industrial Photographer

David Degner works with companies to show what they make and how they make it. The best compliment he gets is that most of his commercial clients come back again and again, often for projects that have little to do with the one that brought them in the first time.

Over the years he has photographed in denim factories, pharmaceutical plants, shipping warehouses, air conditioner assembly lines, fusion research facilities, quality control labs, steel forges, wire production plants, and jewelry workshops. He photographs around heavy equipment, in hazardous environments, and up tall poles in the energy sector, and plenty of other places where things are built, tested, and shipped. The work requires both technical preparation and a certain ease with unfamiliar conditions. Most industrial facilities are not built with photography in mind, and part of the job is solving problems that weren't apparent until you're standing in them.

What separates good industrial photography from documentation is an understanding of the human scale inside these environments. Degner brings a photojournalist's instincts to the factory floor. He spent nearly a decade working as a foreign correspondent photographer in Cairo and across the Middle East, and that background trained him to find the person inside the process, the worker whose posture and attention tell the story of what a facility actually does. A well-lit machine is a catalog image. A worker at that machine, caught in a moment of focus or effort or routine, is something a viewer remembers.

His industrial clients include companies in manufacturing, energy, research, and logistics. He is based in Boston and New York and works on location anywhere the assignment takes him. For companies producing complex or technical products, he has found that the investment in serious photography pays back more than most communications budgets expect. Showing how something is made, done well, builds a kind of credibility that copy alone rarely achieves.