Portraits and Research Photos For Reckitt

This past September, I had the privilege of working inside Reckitt’s Research & Development facility in Montvale, New Jersey — a place where the practical realities of public health play out at the molecular level.

Reckitt is a British multinational consumer goods company born from the merger of Reckitt & Colman and Benckiser, with a portfolio that spans health, hygiene, and nutrition. Their brands — Lysol, Mucinex, Enfamil, Air Wick, among others — are ubiquitous in households worldwide, but the science that underpins them is rarely seen. The Montvale facility is the technical heart of Reckitt’s North American operations, a dedicated R&D center where microbiologists, virologists, and chemists work in state-of-the-art laboratories developing and testing the formulations behind products most people simply reach for off a shelf without a second thought.

The commission came through Emperor, a design consultancy headquartered in London that manages Reckitt’s creative output. The brief was deceptively simple: create a set of images that authentically reflect the working lives of Reckitt employees within their actual environments.

The photographs — a combination of environmental portraits and reportage-style imagery — are intended for recruitment purposes across the company’s careers site, LinkedIn presence, and internal communications. The visual direction called for something genuine rather than corporate in the conventional sense: full-length compositions set against the real architecture of the facility, natural engagement rather than posed interaction, and the kind of eye contact that communicates both competence and purpose.

Photographing in a research laboratory presents a particular set of challenges and rewards. These are spaces designed for function, not aesthetics — governed by biosafety protocols, fluorescent lighting, and the quiet concentration of people engaged in deeply technical work. The visual interest lies precisely in that specificity.

There is an inherent elegance to a well-organized lab bench, to the geometry of containment equipment, to the careful choreography of people moving through controlled environments. The most compelling images emerge not from imposing a visual narrative onto the space but from observing the one that already exists.

The teams at both Emperor and Reckitt were thoughtful collaborators throughout, and the resulting photographs capture something I find increasingly valuable in corporate imagery: the dignity of skilled work, rendered without artifice.