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Southern Delicious

November 2010

Cast iron skillet with golden cornbread on a worn wooden kitchen table in warm morning light

There is a particular smell in a southern kitchen that no camera can capture, but the light comes close. It comes in low through the back windows, falls across the stovetop, and turns everything slightly amber. Biscuits, cast iron, a bowl of field peas sitting in pot liquor. This is the food that interests me most to photograph, not because it photographs easily — it doesn't — but because the difficulty is honest.

I spent a week in late October in a small town in Georgia, eating at a diner that had been running the same menu since the 1960s. Creamed corn from scratch. Slow-roasted pork that had been in the oven since five in the morning. Sweet tea in mason jars. None of it was styled. None of it needed to be. The light was doing everything, and the food was just food someone wanted to eat.

What I came away with was a series of frames that I keep returning to. There's something about food that has been cooked with intention, without performance, that reads completely differently through a lens. The patina on the cast iron. The handmade look of the biscuits. The fact that the table has been used for thirty years. That history photographs itself.

See the Feast portfolio series for the broader food photography work, or the portfolio overview for context. Prints from this series and others are available at the prints page.

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