Watch: the photographic record behind the reporting

Every image on this wall was made for a specific piece of reporting on this site, and each one links to the piece it belongs to. The wall is the photographic side of the archive, so it grows with the reporting: one commission per story, at the size it was made for.

They are generated illustrations rather than documentary photographs. An image here shows what its caption says it shows: a rail platform, a spillway, a water column in polar darkness. But it is not a record of a particular moment at a particular place, and no caption on the site claims otherwise. Where a story rests on something that was actually observed, the observation is a dataset or a named source in the text, never the picture.

One treatment runs through all of them: available light rather than studio light, documentary framing, a full frame rather than a crop built around empty space for type. No legible signage, no identifiable faces, no logos. That consistency is the reason a reader moving down the wall sees one publication rather than a search result, and it is also what makes the odd one out, the macro of an ant and the warming-stripe panel, read as deliberate.

The diagrams and charts elsewhere on the site are a different matter and are treated differently. Those are drawn directly from the dataset named in the caption, at the values that dataset holds, so a reader who wants to check one can go to the source and do it. An illustration cannot be checked that way, so it is never asked to carry a number.