Phood and Fotography

In January of 2005 I made a decision that's had unexpected, and sometimes unwelcome, consequences: I decided I would include a photograph of every recipe I posted on my blog, Seriously Good. It seemed an easy choice. Although my blog was already two years old (making it one of the first food blogs), the best food blogs — the ones I most enjoyed — featured pictures. Clearly I should do so as well.

I had no idea what I was getting into.

First, food photography is hard. Genuine cooked food has a shelf life of no more than 10 minutes. Then the juices coagulate, the fat congeals, the moisture evaporates. Very ugly. Further, if you're photographing food you plan to eat, after 10 minutes it's room temperature — how can you evaluate a dish that isn't eaten at its optimum? And, after all, in a recipe blog like SG evaluating the recipe is the point.

But in that tiny 10-minute window you have to lay out the plate. Position each element to its best advantage. Take a photo and then tweak the plate and take another. Tweak the camera and take another. Tweak the light and take another. Tweak the focus and take another. My current record is 58 photographs, taken in eight sessions this week, of coffee granita.

Tomorrow I'll take another 8 or 9 shots — I have another idea. There's a gorgeous photo waiting for me, I can taste it, but so far my photographic skills, my equipment, my artistic eye, and the subject's tendency to melt in far less than 10 minutes have foiled my efforts.

So why try?

Photography has two purposes in food writing. The first and the one I'm currently most focused on as I hone my skills is evocation.

A written recipe can't pass on the flavors and aromas of the food directly, but a photograph can evoke a sense of those flavors and aromas as though the dish were sitting in front of you. We eat with our eyes as well as our mouths and nostrils. I could wrap a ferret in bacon, cook it, and with the right image most folks would say, "Ewwww, ferret! Looks good though."

So I photograph every recipe I publish, because it's as close as I can get to conveying the reality of the dish. It has turned out that I've developed some recipes that I haven't published because I either didn't photograph them or the photos simply sucked. This was an unintended consequence, and yet, in the long haul, a good consequence.

I mentioned two purposes in food photography. The second one is education.

The goal in this case is to demonstrate a technique and one of the best examples I've seen is Farmgirl Susan's discussion on making her Farmhouse White Bread. (Fair warning: Susan and I are partners in A Year in Bread. Caveat: we wouldn't be partners if we hadn't already respected each other talents.)

Susan explains a step and offers a photo to demonstrate. This is perfect because we're trying to teach bread baking and each photo demonstrates part of the technique. We'll refer back to her demonstration many times in the next year. But, unless one of us learns something new, we won't repeat it. After all, how many time do you need to see a pan of onions sautéing to know what it looks like?

But beyond that, good tutorial photographs are as hard to make as good artistic ones — sometimes harder because taking a photo while handling the food is almost impossible. But although a pretty picture can stand on its own, a tutorial photo without explanatory text is worthless. For that matter, even with an explanation it may be worthless, after all we all know what toast looks like.

Take pictures whenever you can and as many as you can, but don't lose sight of their purpose, a picture is only worth a thousand words if it conveys a thousand words… or an imagined scent.

Kevin Weeks is a Gather food correspondent (Paisano), personal chef, cooking teacher, and writer in Knoxville, Tennessee who spends too many hours on his feet, cooking. "Paisano" is a column focused on peasant dishes from around the world. To read more of Kevin's writings or connect to him click here. His blog, Seriously Good, is read by 75,000 cooks a month.