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The Photoblog

Film camera and contact sheets on a wooden desk — the working materials of a photographer's studio

The photoblog has been running in some form since 2008, long before that word started to feel dated. The format is simple: a photograph, or a few of them, and some words. Sometimes the words are about the image directly. Sometimes they're about what was happening around the shoot, the weather that morning, the way a particular kitchen smelled. Sometimes they're about photography in a more general sense. The thread running through all of it is the work itself.

This is not the portfolio. The portfolio is curated and edited down to the pieces worth presenting to a client or an editor. The photoblog is the wider, messier record of someone who has been making photographs for over a decade and keeps writing about it partly to understand what they're doing and partly because the writing changes the shooting. You notice different things when you know you're going to have to describe them.

The three subjects that recur — food, travel, places — are the same three that drive the paid work. But on the photoblog they show up in their rawer form. A test shoot from a recipe project that didn't quite come together. A week's worth of frames from a city I was visiting for an assignment and kept shooting after the assignment was done. A Saturday morning at the farmers market where I had no brief and no deadline. The photoblog is where the commercial work and the personal work overlap.

From the archive

The earlier entries read differently from the more recent ones. The concerns are the same — light, composition, what it means to be present with a camera — but the voice is younger and less settled. I've left them as they were. Editing old writing to match your current sensibility is a form of dishonesty that I don't find useful. The early posts are a record of where the work and the thinking were at that point, and that record has its own value.

Bread and pastries in warm kitchen light — the kind of image that comes from a slow morning shoot

The food entries

Food is the subject I've photographed most often and written about most directly. The photoblog entries on food tend to be about specific shoots or projects — what I was making, what the light was doing, what worked and what didn't. They're different from the food photography guide, which is instructional. The photoblog entries are more like a notebook from the sessions themselves.

Southern Delicious and All Sanity Depends on This are the two food entries I'd point to first. The southern entry is about unstaged food — a real diner in Georgia, no art direction, no props. The summer entry is about the value of slow personal work, the kind of morning you schedule for no client. Together they describe the two ends of the food photography practice: the editorial assignment and the personal project.

The travel entries

Travel shows up in a few of the earlier entries — I Would Rather Be a Superb Meteor is the most direct — but the photoblog has always been weighted toward food and domestic subjects rather than landscape and place. The travel work lives more fully in the portfolio, where the editorial context makes more sense of it. On the photoblog, travel tends to appear as a feeling rather than a subject: the sense of being somewhere unfamiliar, the particular quality of light in a place you don't know well.

New entries

The photoblog updates infrequently and deliberately. There is no posting schedule. Entries go up when there's something worth writing about — a shoot that generated more thinking than usual, a project that ended in a way worth recording. For the more regular documentation of current work, the portfolio is updated more consistently. For questions or commissions: [email protected].

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