Recently, I headed out to Kemps Creek in western Sydney to photograph a newly completed warehouse development for ESR — a global real estate company specialised in logistics and industrial property. The vast building itself is now home to Toll, one of Australia’s largest logistics providers. However, I was given access, before the handover to the client, while the building was yet to be occupied, to photograph and document the build.
There is something strangely cinematic about this kind of assignment, being in an extensive, semi-rural industrial zone. At Kemps Creek, the warehouse looms out of the flat horizon like a modern monolith — part space station, part fortress. It’s like a man-made moonscape, and I found myself almost alone here, just me and my camera, wandering through steel shadows and sharp geometries.
Shooting at a site like this isn’t about catching fleeting human emotion or theatrical performance — it’s about scale, symmetry and silence. It’s satisfying to compose frames that reflect the power and precision of these enormous structures, capturing their relationship to the surrounding landscape and sky.
ESR, the company behind the development, operates across the Asia-Pacific region, investing in and managing spaces designed for logistics, data centres, and e-commerce infrastructure. Their work reflects the backbone of modern trade — quiet, unseen, but critical.
Photographing this development wasn’t just about showcasing a new warehouse with coloured stripes painted boldly across its facade, it was about documenting the scale of contemporary industry and the quiet grandeur of functional architecture. There’s a peculiar peace in being surrounded by so much cavernous space, steel and sky. As a photographer, I find such moments of solitude and shifting scale incredibly rewarding.
