Design
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Most photography of wooden floors keeps them in context, a backdrop to the rooms they help shape. This collaboration started from a different instinct: that the wood itself is worth making the subject. Hand the material to a duo who treat what they photograph as compositions in their own right, and the grain, the color and the surface become the whole picture.
That was the starting point for Hakwood's collaboration with the Amsterdam photographers Scheltens & Abbenes.
The Photographers
Maurice Scheltens and Liesbeth Abbenes are based in Amsterdam, but their work is international and so is their reputation. They have collaborated for more than two decades, he as a still-life photographer trained in The Hague, she as a visual artist from the Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie. Their standing rests on a particular way of seeing. Rather than presenting an object as a product to be sold, they arrange and reshape it until it reads as a composition in its own right, often collapsing three dimensions into a flat, graphic image. Their practice moves between the commissioned and the autonomous: international clients such as Issey Miyake, Hermès, COS, Paco Rabanne, and the Dutch Royal House, exhibitions from Foam Amsterdam to Galliera Musée de la Mode Paris, and an ICP Infinity Award in New York.
From the Factory Floor to the Studio
The collaboration began not in a studio but on the factory floor at Hakwood. Before any photography, Maurice and Liesbeth came to Hakwood for a tour with owner Mark Hak, to understand how the wood is actually made. The number of steps in the process, and the range of finishes possible, gave them a great deal to respond to. The lab drew them in most: a place where they could experiment freely and chase the colors they felt the shoot needed.
"We always try to look at the world a little differently. Seeing how this wood is made, with that much attention, gave us a great deal to work with."
A range of materials then traveled to their studio. Each setting was constructed deliberately, step by step, an approach captured in the process animations that accompany this piece and reveal how a finished image slowly comes together.
We were in the room to watch it happen, and what stood out was the calm and focus. The duo describe their way of working as a kind of chess game, one of them shifting an object while the other observes the image built slowly in front of the camera long before a frame is taken. In that quiet, unexpected compositions kept surfacing.
The Result
The final series gives Hakwood's floors a presence they rarely get to have. In some frames the duo pushed color combinations you would never expect to see on a floor, the kind of pairings that come from treating wood as material for a composition rather than a sample to document. The parquet tiles in particular were approached more conceptually, photographed in a way that brings the idea behind them to life.
These are images that grow on you. You keep looking, and you keep finding something new. It feels genuinely good to show our product to the world this way.
Part of Something Larger
These images are more than a single campaign. They form part of Hakwood's wider rebranding, a new visual language that will run across the brand's work in the months ahead, the forthcoming brochure included. Looking at wood differently, it turns out, is also a way of looking at the brand differently.
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