Below is an excerpt from a book review "Plenty vs Around My French Table" from Food52.com. I just really appreciate how the author articulates here what is, I think, probably behind my subconscious reactions to different cook books and different styles of food photography. Bad food photography really is very bad.
I can especially relate to her positive "out loud" reactions... ("There are some photos of eggs in this book that will stop you in your tracks" - HA !)
In
Dorie's book, the styling and the photography were a considerable
set-back for me. There's a shot of a cracker that's supposed to look
like someone's just taken a bite out of it. No one has been near that
cracker. In another, there are crumbs carefully arranged to look not
carefully arranged. Salad Nicoise ingredients are nestled together
hyper self-consciously to appear as if some avid cook was simply
collecting her mise en place. Schmears of food on utensils are meant to
look as if the shot were taken mid-meal and really, this food and that
utensil were nowhere near anyone's actual meal. Check out the traces of
cheese-topped onion soup left on the spoon in the shot on page 54. What
is it doing there? No one has been eating that soup. Conversely,
there's a shot of a piece of beef that's meant to look as if it has
just, at that moment, been cut into, but the knife and fork are
spotless. I really puzzled over it--it wanted to convey French food
with all of its connotations of lusciousness, insouciance, and casual
effortless elegance but somehow managed to come across as rigid,
antiseptic and unripe. High and tight, I kept chuckling to myself page
after page after page, hunting for even one photograph that let the
food look real and delicious and appealing.
There is almost no sense in my trying to persuade you to my opinion
about the photography and styling. This is distinctly an "a chacque un
son gout" story. Dorie LOVES these photos, this styling, this strangely
retro era of heavily-propped and aggressively-lit cookbook design. She
effuses about it in her acknowledgements and said she burst into tears
of joy when she learned she could work with this team on this book. Me,
they killed the food. By the time they got it in the right tableau, the
right crock, the just-so schmear and crumb and the light meter checked
and the silver umbrella tilted another hair to the left, the food had
long ago died. I wanted to cook exactly nothing from the book based on
the photography.
I did not have this problem with Ottolenghi's book. Once past the
odd and counter-indicative cover (you could not be certain that this is
a cook book -- it could as easily be an interior designer's fabric
sample binder), I reacted aloud -- an involuntary "oh" or "oh man!" or
" mmm" and even a "holy shit!" at every single turn of the page. There
are some photos of eggs in this book that will stop you in your tracks.
Even collapsed roasted eggplants, still on their roasting sheet and
just out of the oven, look appealing. The shots are taken of the food
in its most alive moment -- the butter is foaming in the cast iron
skillet of sweet potato cakes, the ice cubes are glistening in the
green gazpacho, the pickled red pepper slivers veritably swim like live
brilliant sea creatures in a tidal pool of pink-tinged olive oil. I've
seen this in British books before, particularly in the food photography
of Jason Lowe and the photographer who shot Nigel Slater's books Tender
andKitchen Diaries -- the British really have something great going on
there, and as a direct result, I yellow-stickied 22 things I wanted to
cook from the book, just by looking at the photographs.
(photo taken from Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi)
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