Peter Iain Campbell is an award-winning photographer born in Edinburgh and based in Glasgow, Scotland. Working predominantly within landscape, seascape and portraiture on long form projects, Iain utilises photography to explore liminal environments that would otherwise be inaccessible, seeking to identify particular subjects that both allure and repel.

Between 2001 and 2014, Iain worked as a professional freelance photographer, while continuing to maintain a long-held interest in deindustrialisation and the changing nature of post-industrial landscapes. Having identified the oil and gas industry as Scotland’s last remaining heavy industry and one that had not been fully photographically explored, from the Summer of 2014, Iain sought and secured work onboard a Drilling Rig in the central North Sea. This became the location for his first North Sea photography project, “Starlings on Fire”. From September 2016, having worked as part of the core-crew for 2 years, Iain spent a further year working on a number of different Production Platforms and Drilling Rigs throughout the Scottish sector of the North Sea. With offshore working duties ending in 2018, Iain has continued to explore the incongruous nature of the oil and gas industry, by attempting to document the remaining Production Platforms and Drilling Rigs throughout the Scottish sector, shot from the perspective of the Platform Supply Vessels {PSVs} that service these installations.

His work has been exhibited internationally and includes the group show, “Exposure: Lives at Sea”, exhibited at the National Maritime Museum in London {2020 - 2023}.

His North Sea project, “We Drift Like Worried Fire”, was published as a photobook by ‘Another Place Press’ in March 2025. “Ask The Sea”, a Limited Edition Photo-Zine was published by ‘Another Place Press’ in June 2020. Iain was the winner in the Scottish Portrait Awards 2021 and Runner-Up in 2020.

Iain is the Artist in Residence {2024-2026} at the Centre for Energy Ethics, University of St Andrews, where he is also an Affiliated Researcher. He is a part-time Lecturer in Photography at City of Glasgow College.

Title: "We Drift Like Worried Fire" {2018-2024}

"We Drift Like Worried Fire" is a documentary photography project that considers the changing nature of the oil and gas industry in the North Sea as the region transitions away from a fossil fuel reliant industry to an offshore landscape for renewable energy production.

Partly inspired by the industrial typologies of Bernd & Hilla Becher, it is a project shaped by motion and journey, a documentary of the remaining Production Platforms and Drilling Rigs operating across the entire Scottish sector of the North Sea. At times, shot from the perspective of the Platform Supply Vessels {PSVs} that service these installations, the project also investigates the human element of this story, capturing the faces of those who work onboard these vessels for many weeks at a time, in often challenging and isolating conditions far away from home.

When the first oil and gas fields in the North Sea started to come online from the mid 1970s onwards, the bold prediction was that production across the UK Continental Shelf {UKCS} would peak during the 1980s and start to tail off at some stage in the 1990s. Few, however, speculated that fields would be operational at a viable level beyond that point, decades into the next millenium. The combination of maturing fields, fluctuations in the global price of oil and gas and an environmental acknowledgement of the need to move away from fossil fuels to renewable energies, has encouraged operators to set in motion their own decommissioning programmes. The outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent global pandemic, initially triggered a collapse in the price of oil and further hastened a determination to divert resources towards the renewables industry. Ports and industrial yards around Scotland, northern England and the western coast of Norway, traditionally associated with the construction of oil and gas installations in the 1970s, started investing, expanding and racing to develop the infrastructure to support the decommissioning, dismantling and recycling of oil and gas Production Platforms and Drilling Rigs, while simultaneously supporting the creation of offshore wind turbines.

Social media handles

@peteriaincampbell