As I write, an August heatwave sits heavily on the South of France and there is one place I am glad not to be photographing today: the Chez Theresa snack bar in Nice. This little restaurant has been known for making one thing since 1925, and making it well : socca, a chickpea speciality of the French Riviera. Today, the dish is only made traditionally at 3 places in the city, and working with an open, wood-fired oven, in which 300°C and lively flames are essential, for socca’s crispy-yet-soggy texture, is not for the faint-hearted.

Saint-Tropez is the westernmost outpost of the French Riviera, a long-favoured summer destination of the jet set. So it was a surprise to be sent there on assignment to photograph…an artisan’s humble workshop. Nestled between stores of international luxury brands, the Rondini family’s shop still echoes with the sound of hammers out back, where they have been making sandals by hand since 1927.

As autumn draws into winter, plumes of smoke rise all over the island: above slow fires, special preparations of pork are cured. I was commissioned as photographer to travel to Corsica for a reportage about the artisanal production of the island’s famous charcuterie delicacies -figatellu, coppa, lonzu- and the native, semi-wild, ‘Porcu Nustrale’ pigs from which they are made. The assignment, for a German magazine devoted to meat, was not exactly vegan-friendly.

Tourettes-Sur-Loup, above the French Riviera, was once known as the home of violets. 70 families grew and sent their flowers as far afield as Paris – yet today, only 3 producers remain. I photographed the picking, bunching and crystallisation of these unusual little blooms, whose scent is there one minute – and gone the next.

This spring, I travelled to Bulgaria’s idyllically-named Valley of Roses. On assignment as photographer for Aramco World magazine, I was to make portraits and a reportage. Yet, as in the South of France, Bulgaria’s climate was out of kilter this year, and what should have been a straightforward assignment about growing Damascus roses to produce rose oil, turned out to be a challenging mission indeed.

Editorial photographers’ schedules often depend on their subjects’, and my alarm was set for 04.00 the day I made a reportage about Frédéric Roy. A baker in Nice, Frédéric is known in France and beyond for his crusade to save the traditional, hand-made, French butter croissant from extinction. Wizz Air’s in-flight magazine dedicated a 9-page cover feature to him this month, and I was invited to Frédéric’s bakery to capture all the stages of his croissant-making, and to take his portrait.

Contes, in the hills above Nice, is the last town on the French Riviera with a communist party mayor. As photographer, I visited Contes for the first time to illustrate an article about the current state of the left-wing vote in France in the run-up to the 2022 presidential elections. As the Die Zeit writer interviewed (and I made portraits of) several left-wing residents, it became apparent that disillusionment and contradictions are the order of the day.

Svalbard, 1000 km north of Norway, could not be any more different from the South of France. As photographer and writer, I was privileged, a few years ago, to be invited to join a polar expedition cruise along its western coast. The landscapes were unfamiliar, harsh and striking, and I witnessed, under an eerie sun that never sets, the beauty of glaciers and the incredible adaptability of people and nature to extreme conditions. I also learned that while melting ice leads to catastrophe, it can also lead to hidden treasures – and inspire an extraordinary use of flags.