FIRE IN THE BELLY

THE BENEFITS OF BEING PHYSICAL WITH THE BODY AND MIND

When the Affinity for Food + Culture Meets Photographic Art

by Abby Meaux Conques

We all have jobs, we have stuff. We have appointments and meetings and conference calls and deadlines and families and homework and housework. We do what we can with what we have, and sometimes it’s great, but sometimes it’s just what we need to do to get by. But then there are these people, these passionate professionals, peppered throughout society...whose work is one of those things where you can take one look at it and know that they’re not just getting by, and that there’s way more to it than that. It’s that thing that has no words to describe it; like when you eat an amazing meal, and you know that this is no ordinary meal, but something that was made by the chef with passion and love and fire, and that’s the thing that takes it from amazing to outstanding. That thing...that wordless thing, is what Lafayette’s Denny Culbert has with the way in which he captures food and travel imagery.

Denny Culbert grew up near Akron, Ohio before Louisiana was able to sink her Cajun hooks into him. He attended Ohio University for photojournalism and traveled to India post-graduation for six months. After spending the allotted time that his visa would allow there, he accepted a photography intern position in Baton Rouge in 2008. 2009 brought him to the Advertiser and Lafayette has been his home base ever since.

He embarked on a full-time freelance career in 2011 and is continuing to hone his craft in his Downtown studio today. “My camera afforded me the opportunity to get into the thick of everything this area had to offer. The food...the festivals. The love for Louisiana came easy,” he mentioned.

Culbert’s transition from photojournalism to commercial and editorial food photography emerged from his monthly food column, Dishing It Out, in the Daily Advertiser. “I got to spend a lot of time in the kitchens of local restaurants, getting to know the chefs and being immersed in the community. I realized how much I enjoyed spending time in these Southern kitchens with these chefs,” he explained. Culbert became particularly interested in local chefs who grew, raised and prepared food.

**Tlacolula Market Photo by Denny Culbert**

His photographic freelancing opportunities brought him to the Carolinas to photograph for Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) where he spent a month living in a BBQ bus documenting pitmasters. A SFA member symposium and foodie experience in Mississippi along with a Blind Pig experience (a charitable monthly dinner in Asheville, N.C.) would play their parts in the eventual creative ebbs and flows that Denny and wife/muse, Katie, would experience over the coming years.

In 2013, the couple launched Runaway Dish, a pop-up restaurant with guests holding charitable dinner tickets where local chefs came together to collaborate and passionately feed locals with artful edible creations. The couple’s main focus was to get local chefs to rub elbows and create a sense of community in the culinary sector, connecting the solitary chef gaps with talent and creativity.

Between Runaway Dish pop-ups, the couple released a culinary journal with the same name showcasing all of the magic that occurred during each event with Katie as writer and Denny as photographer. In meeting various people in our area’s culinary community, Runaway Dish inspired other culinary traditions to re-emerge into the area, including full-on Cajun boucheries where smokehouse teams challenged each other using all parts of a hog.

The Runaway Dish events and publication ran their prospective courses, but the couple’s interest in all that is art, creativity and food never waivered. Denny’s freelance client list grew and a plethora of his images can be seen in various publications such as Saveur, Imbibe, Garden & Gun, Southern Living, Taste, The Local Palate, Acadiana Profile Magazine and New Orleans Magazine. He’s landed numerous commercial clients like Tabasco, Criollo de Oaxaca, Honey Baked Ham Company, Cane River Pecan Company, Khavyar, Joel's Catering, the Best Stop, Lafayette Convention and Visitors Commission, Savoie's Foods, CC's Coffeehouse, Bombay Sapphire, Condé Nast, Hennessy and more.

His imagery is also featured in recent cookbooks in print, Chasing the Gator: Isaac Toups and the New Cajun Cooking (Isaac Toups and Jennifer V. Cole), The New Orleans Kitchen: Classic Recipes and Modern Techniques for an Unrivaled Cuisine (Justin Devillier and Jamie Feldmar), and soon-to-be released (April 2020), Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou (Melissa M. Martin).

The couple’s story doesn’t stop there. They recently opened Wild Child Wines, a “tiny neighborhood wine shop” in downtown Lafayette at 210 E Vermilion Street. The name is inspired by the couple’s spunky toddler, Kitt Capri, and is excited to bring organic, natural wines from all over the world to our area. The wine shop will be a place to taste wine by the glass and hang out with fellow wine lovers. It will have a rotating stock of wines in their most natural form; i.e. handcrafted and small batch wines with no taste-altering artificial additives.

They are excited to showcase wines from growers and producers who are passionate about the same natural processes that they came to respect deeply in their history with food-growers and chefs. They will carry batches that producers carefully craft and take pride in, lending reverence to the land and vines, and who do not take measures to speed up natural processes which sacrifice the taste and naturality of the wine.

It’ll be serious wine that’s meant to be fun

**Wild Child Wines in Downtown Lafayette**

I’ll say this, if Wild Child Wines is created with any degree of passion as the couple’s zest for the creative and the culinary, it’s bound to flourish.

You can enjoy Denny’s exceptional imagery on instragram @dennyculbert and @louisianawilds. You can see the happenings of Wild Child Wines on instagram @wildchildwines.