There’s also a visible tension in each photograph between the mechanics of power generation and the natural forces at work, isn’t there?
Some people view hydroelectric energy as harnessing nature’s energy, whereas in a way I think that would be virtually impossible on this scale. Sometimes there’s a tension in these interventions in a landscape with a dam crossing a valley and creating an artificial body of water or some out-of-place concrete structure. And one of the things that comes across in the tension is just the masses of scale of engineering. It’s not high technology, as far as circuit boards and microprocessors and finely tuned engineering, but it’s just the mass of the materials with which they built everything.

Did that immensity make your job any different than it was during your project on coal-fired power plants?
It was harder visually. With the coal-fired power stations, once I found an aesthetic, it was a case of identifying the sites, and the sites were very self-contained, whereas the scale across Scotland was immense. It was an area of hundreds of miles across, but I did spend three months on location, and I did enjoy every day of it. Sometimes I would find nothing for two days and not take a frame, but it all helped give me a picture of the landscape there. It wasn’t something that I could have done in two or three weeks. I just wouldn’t have gotten my head around it at all.