Neal Haddaway
This project examines the environmental and social landscapes created by industrial food production. Using documentary and aerial photography, it traces the visual footprint of farmed salmon and greenhouse tomatoes, revealing how land, water, and labour are reorganised for global markets.
Grounded in fieldwork in Scotland and southern Spain, it documents salmon aquaculture, coastal infrastructure, and altered marine environments in Scotland. In southern Spain, aerial images map vast plastic-covered greenhouses, while ground-level work explores water systems, waste, and labour sustaining year-round export agriculture in a semi-arid climate.
Drone imagery reveals scale and repetition, while observational and portrait work restores human and ecological presence. Together, these approaches frame food production as landscape engineering reshaping coastlines, soils, and hydrological systems.
The Salmon and the Tomato positions food systems at the intersection of climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequality, inviting viewers to see industrial food production as a defining environmental force shaping contemporary landscapes.
The Farm, 2024, Scotland, UK.
The twelve rings of pens 50 metres across loom out of the water, hidden from view from the shore. Each pen can hold hundreds of thousands of fish. One farm typically holds 2 to 3 times the entire wild population of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar). Escapes are common. Farmed fish harbour diseases and parasites that are passed to wild fish. Waste feed and faeces pollute waters and smother substrates, killing native wildlife. Chemicals and antibiotics seep into the coastal waters.
Dense Waters, 2025, Scotland, UK.
Farmed Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) are held in open sea pens in salmon farms across Scotland and Norway. The fish are held at high densities, resulting in high parasite loads and disease. Animal welfare is a major concern, with constant investigations into high mortality rates. In the wild, salmon take years to mature and leave their birth rivers, before mating at sea and returning through a miraculous migration using their sense of smell to their own birth rivers to breed. Farmed fish typically mature within a few years - the result of selective breeding and high-protein feeds.
Feeding the Beast, 2025, Northern Europe.
The 2 million tonnes of salmon produced globally in farms requires wild fish for feed, by some estimates as much as 5-10kg per kilo of consumed salmon. So much feed is needed that one report has estimated that 2.5% of all fish caught globally end up in salmon feed. For Norwegian salmon farms, there is evidence that these wild fish have been collected from the coast of West Africa, where 80% of people depend on fish for their livelihoods. As fisheries collapse, they are driven to migrate via small boats to The Canary islands, with as many as 50,000 people a year taking this incredibly dangerous route. Up to 1-in-5 people die on this journey, and once in Spain, many become trapped in exploitative illegal employment in Almería's greenhouses.
Placeless Foodscape, 2025, Province of Almería, Spain.
The Spanish province of Almería lies on the southern Mediterranean coast, benefiting from year-round sun and warmth - perfect conditions for growing fruit and vegetables. Since the 1970s, plastic-covered greenhouses have spread across the region, protecting the crops from winds, pests and the baking summer sun. Today, 32,000 hectares (320 square km) of these plastic greenhouses exist in a concentrated 'placeless foodscape' - an area modified beyond recognition purely for the industrial production of food. Greenhouses extend as far as the eye can see in what has been called the 'Sea of Plastic'. There is almost no biodiversity here - crop, pollinator, pest, pest predator, labourer. Sometimes greenhouses hold just five species. The industry here causes myriad environmental and social problems as it aims to extract the maximum amount of food possible to send millions of tonnes of produce to supermarkets across Europe.
Waste not, Want not, 2025, Province of Almería, Spain.
13 million tonnes of food is wasted in the UK alone, edible but discarded. But this figure could be much greater if on-farm waste in our overseas supply chains is taken into account. Wholesale prices for fruit and vegetables exported from Almer?a is pushed lower by our supermarkets' demands for cheapness. High aesthetic standards mean only the most perfect produce are chosen for sale. Together this means that huge volumes of edible crops are destroyed and abandoned in Almera's greenhouses. These fruit and vegetables are often left to rot in the Mediterranean sun - a visual reminder that this food is not made for consumption, but rather for profit.