Delicious Ambiguity
March 2009
The frames I end up most attached to are the ones I can't fully explain. This one, for example. Ingredients on a surface. The light is doing something in the upper left corner that I didn't plan and can't recreate. What is it? I don't know exactly. But I know when I look at it that something is happening that wouldn't happen in a sharper, more deliberate photograph.
There's a version of food photography that is so controlled and so precisely lit that the food looks like it was made in a laboratory. It is technically perfect and totally inert. The delicious ambiguity is what you lose when you over-control every variable. The slight imperfection of a real surface. The way steam moves unpredictably. A shadow falling across the wrong thing at the right time.
I try to leave room for the unexpected in every shoot. Some frames from that space go nowhere. Some of them turn into the best thing I made that week. For the more deliberate portfolio work, see the Feast series or the portfolio overview. Prints available at the prints page.