The Mind Boggling Micro World of Food Styling

Yesterday I styled nut clusters for a packaging shot. It was one of those shoots where I was required to work on something very small and very detailed for a very long time. Detail work is great for me since I am able to get into the "zone" pretty easily and can concentrate for hours on end in one small area. The clusters were 1 inch cubes. They were made up of almonds and cranberries and sugar syrup as a binder. Then, they were dipped in white chocolate. My job was to cut one open and make each half  look "perfect". And not just perfect as in looking at it sitting on set. Perfect with each nut enlarged bigger than the size of the computer monitor! 

Making something look perfect, in my opinion, is sometimes better left to machines, illustrators or God.....but I am always up for a challenge so I tried anyway.  After attempting to cut these open and find one that cut beautifully clean and showed the required 3-5 nuts and 1-2 cranberries I decided fate was not going to be the answer. It's something you really don't know unless you try it and see the outcome. Everything was crumbling, chocolate was dragging, cranberry color was running into the chocolate, nuts were not nicely dispersed, etc.......Plan B.  I decided to build the perfect nut cluster with hot glue, clay and carefully chosen and individually cut nuts and cranberries. Yikes! Many hours later with dozens of trips back and forth to put it on set and under the "microscope" I was finished. The art director gave the thumbs up. They looked "close enough" like mirror images of each other to move on to dipping in chocolate. OK, so who knew that (red)clay would melt by the heat of the warmed white chocolate? Plan C. Drizzled the chocolate on the sides and back of the cluster so the entire cluster was not subject to the heat. And, it worked. Let that set in the frig for 5 minutes and it was ready for the next step.  I needed to shave off chocolate from the "cut" side of each cluster to make it look cut and not dipped. After another  hour or so of looking at the cluster on the computer monitor and adjusting cranberry goo or crumbs of white chocolate or microscopic pieces of fuzz that had found their way to my lovely cluster it was finally approved by the art director. 

Truthfully, it was a LONG 11 hour day. I spent about 6 hours straight on just one nut cluster. And I wondered to myself how many food stylists out there are not good at detail work and model building. Probably quite a few that have come into this job with food skills but not art skills.  This job portrays exactly what I mean when I tell people that I only care about how the food looks. And, I am not a chef........I am a food artist.

For Your Eyes Only.

When it comes to a photograph of food, all you have to work with is a 2 dimensional piece of paper with an image of food on it. You can't smell it. You can't taste it. You can't hear anything pertaining to what is going on around the food (think violins or noisy pizzeria or Grandma singing from the kitchen), You can't touch it. You can only see it from this one point of view. That means, all you have to convey a sense of place (including sounds) is this photo. All you have to tell the story of taste and smell and feel is this piece of paper or computer screen. That's it. But remember, a picture can tell a thousand words......so we are told.

Food styling to me is so expressive in really unspoken ways. Ways we may not think of when we grab that Italian food magazine off of the rack at Borders. But that photo of prosciutto on that table in that setting makes your mouth water. It reminds you of the smells at the Italian deli on the east side of town. And it takes you to that beautiful city of Parma where it is made. You feel a sense of the process it took to make it. You think of the sweet old guy who sells it from his store and gives free samples to the children in the neighborhood. Oh...and that taste...just like I remember last time I had prosciutto...that restaurant down on Buffalo street in the third ward. What a night that was. All from a photo.

People who sell magazines know that they are appealing to many senses when they make photos for their covers. They are hoping so anyway. Enough to get you to want to pick up that magazine or cookbook and look at it. Hopefully enough to buy the publication and read it recipe by recipe. Photos are powerful tools. We all know that. Everyday life tells us so. Think of the provocative images we see everyday via the Internet, newspaper or television. People are very effected by visual images. Advertisers know it, newspapers know it, food stylists know it, painters know it (to name just a few!).

A common link we humans share is the ability to look at something and interpret it with memories created by of all of our senses. Recalling a time, a place, a smell, a sound, a feeling, a taste. And we all interpret visual images differently depending on our experiences (or lack of) in life. That, my friend, is a beautiful thing indeed.  So when you look at photograph think about all the moments and memories it brings up for you. That is your life, your experiences, your uniqueness.