Robert Nickelsberg Photography

Robert Nickelsberg, a TIME magazine photographer for over 25 years, has documented conflicts in Kashmir, Iraq, Sri Lanka, India and Afghanistan. I approached Robert in 2010 to show him the “just released” Apple iPad and demonstrated how I thought it was going to be an indispensable tool for sharing portfolios and presenting photography. At that time his website used Adobe Flash, which was not visible to iOS phones and tablets. My objective in producing this new site for Robert was to build a purpose-driven portfolio presentation experience from scratch that was designed with tablets in mind. The layout size would be optimal for tablets, buttons would be sized for finger tapping and the interaction would be a simple two-level hierarchy and not require scrolling; you could move quickly through the galleries with “tap-tap” precision. When a gallery is selected, all of the images for that gallery load dynamically in the background so that when you advance to the next photograph, it would appear instantly from cache. My vision for the interface was to make his photography the centerpiece without distraction– the area surrounding his photographs would be dark shades of gray (long before “dark mode”).