© Donald Weber

You are Associate Professor of Contemporary Photography and Head of the Photography Major at Aalto University. What does it mean to educate photographers within a university environment today, particularly one in which photography is understood not only as an artistic practice but also as a form of research?

Donald Weber (DW): I now work mostly with MA and doctoral students and so its a slightly different question than it would be with a BA student. What I like about being in such an environment is that these are serious students who have serious questions, and what we can do is give them the time and space to sit within those questions, to discard them, to make up new ones, or reaffirm the ones they already have. University is an environment where one can play, fail miserably, and keep going. A grade is a grade is a grade. The most interesting students are the ones who hungrily strip-mine the university for everything it offers, playing and experimenting with their questions.

Nowhere else, I believe, can you so fully remove the demands of the market and the conforming conditions that comes with it, and really go all in on a few questions one might have and really knock at the edges. The way I frame our education is that students are developing a practice rather tan simply producing a body of work. It is the practice that enables bodies of work to happen. What we offer is a kind of scaffolding, or architecture, within which that practice can develop.

Aalto has a strong tradition of practice-based and artistic research. How do you see the relationship between making images, producing knowledge, and developing critical thinking among your students?

DW: One downside to a university environment, particularly in response to the dramatic changes occurring in the field of (professional) photography, is that research, both as a word and an operation, has crept in and slightly muddled the view for many students. What I sometimes see is less a research practice than a research aesthetic: certain visual forms and ways of presenting work that have emerged from a culture of research. Search-as-research can easily become the endless reconfiguration of existing information.

That being said, ARTISTIC research proposes a rather different engagement with practice. It allows students to investigate their working methods, processes, desires, and assumptions as photographers. This gives them the possibility of becoming what I would call critical doers rather than passive assemblers. So, questions like: who else has done this? How do I do it? Why am I doing it in this way? What happens when I change the method?

For me, artistic research begins with the recognition that the practice itself can produce knowledge. A great deal of that knowledge is embodied and procedural. You learn through doing something repeatedly, encountering resistance, making mistakes and recognizing things that could not have been known beforehand. This is another reason we emphasize developing a practice over producing singular works. A practice is what allows the questions, and eventually the works, to continue.

Donald Weber examining places with participant of The Bureau of Operational Landscapes 

Archival, The Bureau of Operational Landscapes 

Archival, The Bureau of Operational Landscapes 

Photography is currently being transformed by AI, synthetic images, new forms of surveillance, and an unprecedented circulation of images. What do you think will be the most important challenges, and perhaps opportunities, for photography education over the next decade?

DW: For me, what risks getting lost is photography’s traditional encounter with the world, as opposed to synthetic imagery’s encounter with representations of the world. Perhaps it is naive of me, but I still believe in the indexical power of photography, in the basic fact that something existed before the camera and entered into a particular relationship with an apparatus, a photographer and a moment in time.

What interests me increasingly, however, is the real as encounter rather than the real as objective truth. An encounter with physical actuality gives photography a way of speaking about a shared material world without resurrecting naive claims about photographic objectivity. A photograph can lie, manipulate and exclude, but its making still generally begins with some form of encounter.

This creates an enormous opportunity for photographic education., and something we are working towards at Aalto. I have started to see practices seeking a kind of material re-anchoring, finding ways to make image-making tangible and connectable again to the physical world. I already notice that the novelty of the digital has largely worn off for my students (for me as well). I see them mixing old and new technologies, using analogue processes alongside computation, breaking devices apart or deliberately working against their intended functions. They seem interested in getting inside the apparatus again, and that, to me, is exciting.

Orientation Map, The Bureau of Operational Landscapes

Orientation Map, The Bureau of Operational Landscapes 

You were originally trained as an architect and worked with Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam before becoming a photographer. What was it that photography allowed you to see, investigate, or experience that architecture could not?

DW: Photography gave me a more intensive way of looking. It requires me to really look carefully, to be in the world, to smell it, taste it, etc., to get a sense of the place as it unfolds around you. When I was working as an architect, the production of space often happened at a distance, literally from afar, through drawings, periodic site visits, perhaps some research into local context, etc., but it was photography that actually resurrected my love of architecture precisely because it gave me the opportunity to be in those spaces with an intensity of focus.

The camera is a kind of translation machine. Because it is so closely attached to your face (so to speak), to your body, and because photography requires sustained attention, it heightens any awareness of the spatial conditions around you. Thus I become more conscious of scale, distance, surface, movement, and the way space unfolds over time. So, photography is a way of experiencing architecture from within, through the body and through duration.

The Bureau has installed eight overlooks—interpretive signs placed at key vantage points—to offer perspectives beyond the official narratives of efficiency and progress. Designed to mimic typical tourist signage, our overlooks complicate the port’s official narrative, drawing attention to what is often ignored or erased in the pursuit of economic power.
Each overlook is embedded with an NFC tag, allowing visitors to tap into deeper histories, unseen structures, and hidden forces shaping the landscape. In Park Maasvlakte, signage isn’t just informational—it’s a tool for reinterpreting logistics in real time.

Looking back at your photographic practice, how has your understanding of what an image can do changed over time? Were there particular projects, encounters, or moments when you realised that photography was becoming less about representing something and more about investigating it?

DW: Oh yes, although I think this has been a hallmark throughout my 20+ years of practice. For some reason I tend to never repeat myself. I have learned that it I need to “listen” to the environment around me, and eventually it tells me how it should be depicted or represented. I suspect that goes back to my architectural training, which gave me a sensitivity to place. I try to listen intently to how a space behaves, and, from there, find methods capable of revealing that sensation.

The Port of Rotterdam of really important in this realization. At some point I realized that I was using inherited conventions of landscape photography to represent a spatial condition that those conventions were never designed to describe. I eventually began calling such places landscape operational landscapes, enormous, dispersed environments organized through and by logistics, distance, restricted access, and systems that remain difficult to perceive from any single position.

That was when I knew I had to find another method. This one just wasn’t working. Rules of thirds, a focus on the horizon, the beauty of light, all these familiar tools seemed increasingly inadequate.

More importantly, I began to realize that photography was producing knowledge outside the photograph itself. And it was the act of making pictures in these landscapes that caused certain things to happen. Security guards approached me, or certain views became impossible because of restrictions on where a person could stand. Distances became physically exhausting. What happened is that I realized the scale of the landscape exceeded what the camera could meaningfully contain.

I began thinking of all this as “extra-photographic” conditions: things reveal through the act of photographing that may never appear in the photograph. At that point photography became a kind of research instrument for me. The finished image remains important, but I chose to amplify — to listen to, to really consider — everything that happened in trying to make it.

Your practice has progressively moved towards research, eventually leading to a PhD in artistic research. How did this transition happen for you? Did the questions you were asking as a photographer gradually become research questions, or did the PhD itself change the way you approach photography?

DW: The questions came first. I wanted to do a PhD because I already had a lot of questions about what I was doing and why, and I wanted to find a way to articulate those experiences into something more precise and actionable.

What the PhD gave me was a demand for rigour and clarity — what do I actually mean by the words I am using? What is exactly happening when I make a photograph? What kinds of knowledge might such a process produce? Artistic research gave me the permission to make the practice itself the object of inquiry.

It also allowed me to name things that I had previously experienced mainly as practical frustrations. Ideas such as the official landscape, the logistical landscape and the extra-photographic are all exemplary of what gradually emerged from trying to understand why existing photographic methods seemed insufficient for the spaces I was encountering.

So the PhD changed my practice, but largely by helping me recognize and articulate what the practice had already been telling me.

Archival, The Bureau of Operational Landscapes 

The Bureau of Operational Landscapes examines places that are fundamental to contemporary life but often remain invisible to the public, ports, extraction zones, agro-industrial complexes, and other operational landscapes. What initially drew your attention to these places, and what did you feel was missing from the way they were being represented?

I might slightly challenge the premise that these landscapes are invisible. In many ways they are extraordinarily visible, massive blemishes comprised of massive gantry cranes, warehouses, enormous ships so big you want to cry; all this is the familiar detritus of the image of globalization. And they are everywhere. The peculiar condition is that these places can be hyper-visible as images while remaining inchoately out of sight, inaccessible as lived spaces.

I lived in Rotterdam for a number of years, in the old harbour area, and what I saw every day did not match the reality of what a contemporary harbour actually is. The Port of Rotterdam, its heart of operations, is nearly an hour’s drive from the city centre, it is so far that even most Rotterdammers have never actually been there. The visible harbour within Rotterdam is in many ways a historical, or even imaginary harbour, made from memories of an industrial landscape that migrated west out of the city years if not decades ago.

That incongruity between Rotterdam’s identity as a port city and the spatial reality of the Port is what fascinated me, motivated me to really go and find out: where is this famous harbour, and what’s it all made of?

There is already a very recognizable image, as photographers we all know it: warehouses, shipping containers, factories, ships, that kind of thing. We’ve been seeing that photograph forever it seems. What I gradually realized was that I did not want to produce another image of logistics, but I did want to know how a logistical landscape actually operates as a spatial and political condition.

This is where Allan Sekula’s critique of a certain kind of landscape photography became useful tforo me. He famously described some photographs by Lewis Baltz (The New Industrial Parks of Irvine, California) as the “neutron bomb school of photography,” where the buildings all remain but the people are killed off. The larger point I take from him is that a landscape can be represented with extraordinary descriptive precision while the forces producing that landscape remain strangely absent.

This is what I felt in Rotterdam, and certainly in my early photographs I could see this same effect. Every photograph I made seemed in danger of reproducing the already existing “official” image of the port. But I wanted a messier image, one that might begin to register the contradictions, restrictions, and complex spatial politics of the place.

The Bureau’s suitcase-as-tour-guide is a mobile field station for navigating the port— part toolkit, beacon, and tactile provocation for guided tours. More than a container, it structures encounters, shapes attention, and choreographs movements through Maasvlakte’s infrastructures.
Inside, objects bridge the logistical and the sensory: binoculars, field guides, and zinc-cast artifacts. Each object acts as a narrative spark, disrupting habitual ways of seeing. Passed from hand to hand, they transform spectators into participants, creating a haptic dialogue with the landscape.

The Bureau of Operational Landscapes exists in images, tours, and interventions—but it also exists in print. More than a record, this book is a repository of research and a site of experimentation. Extending the Bureau’s investigations into operational and logistical landscapes, it brings together photography, essays, and fieldwork to complicate the official image of these spaces. Part documentation, part intervention, the book reframes how logistical landscapes are seen, recorded, and experienced. This is not just a book to be read; it is a tool for seeing differently.

One of the most interesting aspects of The Bureau is that photography becomes part of a larger practice involving walks, tours, encounters, and site-specific situations. Why was it important for you to move beyond the photographic image and physically bring people into these spaces? Can walking and looking together become a form of photographic research?

I realized that representation alone was not enough. These spaces are optimized and managed carefully; they are so vast and dispersed that they become almost impossible to comprehend from a single position.

Walking, touring, simply being there, all invite other kinds of encounters with the landscape. This is where I my thinking about the official and unofficial began to develop. An official account tells you where to stand, what is significant, or what can be seen and how the landscape should be understood. There is simply one story that gets told. My own experiences in these places always far more contradictory, they can be foul and stinky, and yes, at times amazing and beautiful.

The Bureau became a way of extending the photographic apparatus. A walk can organize looking while a tour can establish a sequence of (contradictory) viewpoints. A sign can direct attention while giving someone else a camera can redistribute who gets to describe the place.

So yes, I think walking and looking together can become a form of photographic research. For me, photography has always involved more than framing a view and pressing the shutter. It involves positioning a body in space, choosing a viewpoint, waiting, moving, encountering restrictions, and paying sustained attention.

Once you understand photography in those terms, a walk or a tour can perform some of the same operations as a camera. They create conditions for looking and for discovering what becomes visible from a particular position.

A landscape like the Port of Rotterdam abstracts the human view from its on-the-ground reality, reducing complex operations into manageable, seemingly ordered visuals. It projects a world of frictionless circulation while restricting access and redirecting attention. Up close, the landscape remains elusive—fences block entry, security dictates movement, and critical aspects of port operations stay out of sight. Distance isn’t just a byproduct of logistics; it’s a tool for managing perception. The Bureau works within and against this logic, using photography to examine how logistical landscapes construct their own image. The Bureau’s panoramic photographs mimic the sweeping views of ports and terminals, adopting the visual logic of logistics while also exposing its contradictions. These photographs function both as industrial traces and acts of visual reclamation, turning Bureaucratic Vision back on itself. They reveal how logistics constructs its own visibility, inviting us to reconsider what it means to see—and be seen—within this system.

You describe the mission of The Bureau as helping the public “read the land” and expand its narratives, intervening in the official story. What does it mean, in practice, to intervene in an official narrative through photography? And who gets to decide which stories, histories, and forms of knowledge become visible?

Well this is the point — who exactly decides? I was always struck by how singular the narrative of the Port of Rotterdam could be, and how carefully it is managed. There is an element of stagecraft out there, a strange, twisted form of logistical theatre. The official landscape is produced through photographs, maps, visitor centres, permitted roads, viewing platforms, signs, security restrictions, guided tours and everything else. Together these things establish where you stand and what you are expected to see (and do).

And that’s what I am interested in: what other stories and experiences are already present in those same locations? The Bureau is less interested in supplying another authoritative story than in making visible how stories about places acquire authority in the first place. A rogue sign, an alternative overlook, a guided walk or simply standing somewhere you would normally drive past can slightly destabilize the apparent inevitability of the landscape.

That question of inevitability is very important to me. Landscapes are made, they are work. They are infused with political decisions, economic decisions, engineering decisions, and historical accumulations that eventually start to appear natural.

To “read the land” is therefore to recognize that what appears fixed could have been otherwise. Once a landscape becomes legible as something constructed, rather than something inevitable, it also becomes open to questioning.

The Topographic Photograph applies a standardized method to an unstable environment—an informational process shaped by movement, instruction, and inevitable failure. A car-mounted camera follows set instructions along a designated route, recording the port with the structured gaze of an infrastructural survey. But logistics is never without friction. Road closures, faulty GPS coordinates, and unexpected detours interfere, forcing adaptation and improvisation.
The system does not fail, but neither does it fully succeed. Instructions are followed, but rarely fulfilled—chance, misalignment, and human adjustments shape the final photographs. The landscape that emerges is not fixed, but processual, unstable, and shaped by the act of photographing it.

Route 15 instructions: Depart the P&O ferry terminal and end at the Port of Rotter­dam’s Douane headquarters. Task: Take one photo every few seconds. Try not to get stopped. Distance: 31 kilometers 

The Topographic Photograph is an image-making method that treats logistics not as a spectacle, but as a system. It adopts tools of mapping and recording, though with results that are less precise. The process exposes gaps, disruptions, and contradictions within a landscape designed to appear seamless.

After completing your PhD and developing The Bureau of Operational Landscapes, where do you feel your research is taking you next? Are there new kinds of landscapes, questions, or photographic methods that you are now interested in exploring?

Right now I am too enthused by what I am doing to want to leave it behind and move on. I really want to establish the Bureau as something that can sustain itself and travel into different landscapes and situations.

One direction I am increasingly interested in is what I call computational landscapes. I want to follow computation out of the screen and back into the land. So that means looking at electrical grids and sub-stations, dams, water and cooling facilities, data centres, cables, and other enormous material systems required to make computation possible.

This has an interesting continuity with the logistical landscape. Where logistics often appears abstract and frictionless until you encounter its enormous territorial footprint, computation produces (and is usually represented by) a similar illusion of immateriality.

What I have learned through the Bureau, however, is that the landscape itself has to dictate the method. Tours and walking are useful starter methods, but I imagine the computational landscape will demand something different.

What that is, I don’t know yet, but I do know that I will start with a photograph and see happens from there.

The Bureau of Operational Landscapes