Simon Ladefoged

A look through Ladefoged's personal work quickly establishes that he has dedicated himself to pan-handling for the beauty of the ordinary.

Future work, he hopes, will allow him to apply the same aesthetic rigorousness to bigger landscapes. But for the time being the personal work has had to take a back seat, because his masterly compositional precision caught the eye first of Danish agencies, and latterly of production companies, for whom he has worked first as a DP, and then, when he realised he found lighting camera work too geeky ("I wasn't so interested in all the technical aspects. I'd wanted to focus on the people in front of the camera rather than working out how to get the camera from A to B") as a freelance director.

A test film for PlayStation and an AIDS campaign were both shortlisted at last year's Cannes, and earned him a place on the shots New Directors reel.

People are notable by their absence in his personal portfolio, a technique Ladefoged has employed to stop the viewer judging a sitter's clothing, hair or social rank. "Without a person you get a different tone. There's more ambiguity. There's more work to be done," he says.

But in trying to allow for aesthetic ambiguity, he has made a rod for his own back, professionally. When he first started out in Copenhagen, in 1995, he had to work hard to convince agencies to let him handle people. "Actually, I love to shoot people: this was the biggest struggle for me." A struggle he has convincingly won, 10 years on, judging by the caliber of his commissioned work today.

Copenhagen is perhaps a relatively small pond: Ladefoged reckons there are only five or six agencies you'd actively want to work for. But even though it may be less of a cut-throat environment than London, Copenhagen is still a competitive buyer's market when it comes to photography and directing. Nevertheless, Ladefoged is more interested in pursuing integrity than Euros. "To get something going you must be faithful to your visual identity," he says, and backs this by saying how he now wants to go back to the work that hasn't been commissioned yet and nurture it. "You'll find a lot of references from my personal work in my commissioned work - so it's vital to keep developing that side," he adds.

Ladefoged thinks there is such a thing as a Scandinavian look: "You can see when something's shot in Scandinavia in much the same way that you can tell when it's shot in the UK, the US or Budapest. Locations and people seep into your photographs somehow. So with Scandinavia, yes, you have this exotic feeling about it: something cold, desaturated, a bit 1970s."