Inside Caran d’Ache: Shooting a Factory Story for Encore! Magazine
Some briefs arrive already charged with meaning. Caran d’Ache, one of Switzerland’s most iconic luxury brands and the only remaining manufacturer of colour pencils in the country, was the subject of an assignment I shot for Encore! Magazine in Geneva. Not a product shoot. Not a campaign. Something closer to a portrait of a place: the raw materials, the machinery, the people whose hands make the work.
What an editorial assignment actually looks like
Magazine work operates differently from commissioned brand photography. There’s no client to manage, no mood board to execute against. The editorial brief is essentially : go find out what’s true and bring back images that prove it.
At Caran d’Ache, what’s true is quiet and precise. Raw pigment in industrial bins. Workers at benches who have been doing this long enough that the camera stops mattering. Rows of finished pencils under fluorescent light. The factory smells of wood shavings and something chemical and not unpleasant. The machinery is loud but the people move around it with a kind of stillness. My job was to stay out of the way of all that and photograph it honestly.
Why editorial work matters for a photographer’s practice
I get asked sometimes why I pursue magazine assignments alongside hotel and brand commissions. The short answer is that editorial work keeps your eye honest. When you’re shooting for a brand, there’s always a version of the image that’s been pre-approved somewhere, a general sense of what the pictures are supposed to confirm. Editorial work has no such safety net. The images have to earn their place on their own terms.
The longer answer is that work published in magazines like Encore! reaches exactly the kind of audience I want to connect with, people who care about craft, quality, and the specific character of a place or a brand. The Caran d’Ache story sits alongside hotel photography and brand work in my portfolio not in spite of being different from those things, but because of it.
Working as an editorial and hotel photographer in Switzerland
Based in Vevey, I work across editorial, hotel, and brand photography, sometimes in the same week. If you’re a magazine editor with an assignment in Switzerland or France, or a hotel or brand looking for photography with an editorial sensibility, I’d be glad to hear about it.
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