Mouthwateringly Beautiful
"Blackcurrant Leaf Sorbet & Blackcurrant Jelly", photograph by Sara Taylor from 100 Great Desserts, by Mandy Wagstaff, p. 66.
Some few years ago I bought a cookbook called In & Out of the Kitchen in Fifteen Minutes or Less, by Anne Willan, photography by Sara Taylor (New York : Rizzoli, 1995, 128 pages). I like the recipes well enough–it has one of my favorites: baked eggs in individual ramekins, cooked in the microwave–but the real reason I have it is because of the photographs by Sara Taylor.
Here is the link to the Amazon page for the book. I do this so that you can admire the cover photograph by Ms. Taylor (go ahead, click on the link to see the larger size!). The style of the photograph is typical of the photographs that show up every six pages or so throughout the book. I find them refreshingly beautiful as illustrations and also inspirational as art works. I was once moved to try recreating a couple of them in watercolor but didn't really succeed.
A few months ago we were shopping for remaindered books at Daedalus Books (they sell mostly remainders and we're lucky to be close to their warehouse in Columbia, MD) when I chanced to leaf through a book called 100 Great Desserts, by Mandy Wagstaff (London : Kyle Cathie Limited, 2004, 176 pages). At first glance I thought the photographic illustrations were pretty, then I decided on beautiful, then I started to notice the style and my excited reaction to it and I just knew that it was the same person who had provided photography for In and Out of the Kitchen, although I didn't remember her name at the time. I bought the book.
I finally remembered to check my intuition and it was accurate: the photography in both books was indeed by one person named Sara Taylor.
Not all of the photographs are executed with this same vocabulary, but many are and succeed quite nicely. The others still show recognizable characteristics: a very strong graphic sense to the layout and composition, and a taste for highly saturated color palettes. The photograph I reproduced above (by means of a poorly taken photograph of curved page of the book–please forgive me the violence I've done to her perfect image) will give a taste.
This typical composition has a rear panel painted in a strong color (although there are some with muted and subtly shaded earth-tones) with shelves affixed and painted in vibrantly contrasting color. The dish being illustrated is arranged with some accompanying artifact–in this case a second dish being illustrated. The viewpoint is usually–but not invariably–straight on so that only the front edge of the upper shelf is seen.
The photographs with the stark, two-shelf composition put me in mind of, I'm thinking, 17th century Dutch still lives where where game (a rabbit comes to mind) caught in the hunt are strung up on a nail in the wall and painted. Or maybe I'm confusing it with this "A Young Rabbit and Partridge Hung by the Feet" (1751) by Pariesien Jean-Baptiste Oudry. (By the way, here's an interesting blog entry, "Still Life with Dead Animal", that I stumbled over while looking for the dead rabbit that I never found.)
I haven't found out much more about Sara Taylor yet, although I did discover that she won a 1996 James Beard Foundation Book Award for her work in In and Out of the Kitchen.
Now that I know who she is and my attention has been focused, i think I'll have to see more of her work.
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on Thursday, 18 September 2008 at 03.36
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Fine photos they are. Quite dramatic for food, but they work.