Halden Studio
A photographer's portfolio where the work is the interface.
Self-directed build for an invented business — nobody commissioned this. Everything you can click is real and working; only the company is made up.
A series-based gallery with a keyboard-navigable lightbox, built to stay out of the way of the images.
Halden Studio is an invented documentary photographer, built to solve a problem specific to creative portfolios: the site has to be confident enough to look designed, and quiet enough to disappear behind the work.
Images are grouped into series rather than dumped into one grid, because a body of work reads differently from a pile of pictures. Frame sizes vary within each series to break the monotony of a uniform grid.
The lightbox is fully keyboard operable — arrow keys move between frames and wrap at both ends, Escape closes it. Opening it locks scrolling on the page underneath, so you do not lose your place. It is marked up as a modal dialog so screen readers announce it correctly.
The artwork here is generated, not photographed. Each piece is an SVG composition derived from a hash of its own name, so it is identical on every load — a real commission would carry the photographer's actual images.