Food photography isn’t something I’ve really tried. I’m not sure why, given my general interests. It feels like a crowded aesthetic space but also something that has in its own way as much of a specific learning curve as portraiture does—there’s a specific kind of lighting, but there’s also some very demanding thinking about staging the shot.
But photographing food in a market of some kind I can handle because the decisions about staging have generally already been made by the merchant. And if you get to some markets early—in this case Borough Market near London Bridge in London—you generally can get some clear views of the product without a ton of people in the way.
I have been thinking about food photography a bit in relationship to stock photography. I’ve made fairly heavy use of Unsplash for images to accompany my writings in this newsletter and I’m quite impressed with the quality of work that some photographers post to it. In many ways the free work is better than the work you’d have to pay for on iStock, the partnered site. But I am also struck that at least for some concepts or keywords, the cupboard is pretty barren whether we’re talking free or paid. And on a few concepts, it’s all the paid images and really they’re generally just terrible—cliches piled on cliches.
Food photography seems to me in the middle as far as that goes. It’s riddled with cliches (especially the work that’s offered as stock photography) but there’s also some marvelously attractive and distinctive image-making around food.
I’m still struggling to think of photographic projects that might focus my attention or give me some constraint but also a goal, and I almost wonder if some kind of conscious riffing off of stock photography might serve—trying to fill in keyword ideas that few people represent and trying to do something different than the standard shots of people in bright clean offices working together on a PointPoint presentation.