British Journal of Photography - December 2016

A cookbook by William Egglestone, Stephen Shore, Ansel Adams and more...

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Editor’s Introduction The Food Issue

Foodie culture is still going strong, prioritising a looser, wider look at what we eat and where it comes from, and a wave of new imagery in its wake. The new indie food magazines bear testimony to that, and it’s interesting to see champagne maker Krug investing in branded cookbooks. This issue features plenty of other recent projects, too – from Bobby Doherty’s eye-catching commission for New York Magazine, to Per-Anders Jörgensen’s book project with Michelin-star chef Konstantin Filippou.

Even so, contemporary food culture isn’t the whole story because, as Susan Bright points out, images of food have been around for as long as photography. Bright, who’s currently investigating the history of food in photography, says such images are imbued with ideology, as do the publishers behind the recent CCCP Cook Book – whether it’s encouraging women back into the kitchen post-war, or promoting a rosy view of Soviet living standards.

Martin Parr, for his part, is fascinated with food, but resolutely not with “posh food”. “It is one of the features of my work that food is shown as you find it for real, rather than the alluring perfection normally displayed in adverts,” he has stated, his work highlighting the darker side of consumer culture, instead of promoting it. But if there’s a sense that photographs of food can represent the everyday, it’s most clearly picked out here in the article on The Photographer’s Cookbook. A long-forgotten archive project recently republished by Aperture, it features images and recipes from some of photography’s most celebrated practitioners.

“It gave me another way in to these photographers,” says curator and editor Lisa Hostetler, adding: “And that is just a completely different story from their day-to-day lives.”

Diane Smyth December issue editor Introduction: December 2016

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Featured

36 – 49 A Fine Spread There is no shortage of publications devoted to foodies and offering a contemporary twist to classic cuisine.

We’ve picked six of the best indie publications and speak with the creatives whose individual approaches make them unique among the many.

68 – 75 Norse Code Swedish photographer Per-Anders Jörgensen’s chance meeting with gastronomic phenomenon Konstantin Filippou led to the creation of a recipe book that reflects his fusion cuisine.

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Featured: December 2016

50 – 66 The Art of Dining Martin Parr is one of Britain’s most prolific food photographers, but he eschews the garnished and contrived presentation of posh foods in preference for real grub, eaten by real people.

We investigate his Art of Dining.

76 – 83 Cookbook Tucked away in the George Eastman Museum archives is a long-forgotten project started in 1977, featuring work

by Stephen Shore, Ansel Adams and William Eggleston. Aperture has revived it in The Photographer’s Cookbook.

Featured: December 2016

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All images Š Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine.

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020 7055 6500 info@parkcom.co.uk @ParkCommLondon #PrintedByPark of Britain:Yogananthan Cover Story TellingPortrait Tales: Vasantha Projects: Commission

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era recipes in an aspirational Soviet Union Projects 21 Henry Hargreaves examines the artistry of organic design 22 David Brandon Geeting’s quirky commission on eating a slice of toast containing an imprint of one’s own face 24 Bobby Doherty’s covert shoot of New York City supermarkets 28 Paloma Rincón’s playful still lifes, photographed in the sweltering heat of Spain’s midday sun 30 Tanya Houghton challenges the notion of a fixed home by turning her lens on our eating habits 32 Carl Kleiner reimages bread to help change its perception as a carb-heavy evil Features 36 Six of the best indie food magazines taking a unique, intelligent look at gastronomy 50 Martin Parr’s art of dining 68 Per-Anders Jörgensen shoots the fusion cuisine at Konstantin Filippou that revolutionised Viennese gastronomy 76 Aperture revives a longforgotten cookbook featuring work by Ansel Adams, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore

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Agenda Lurid, revolting and glorious: Taschen reprints Salvador Dalí’s culinary classic Any Answers: Pete Souza on life as the official White House photographer Liz Hingley’s collection of family recipes celebrating the diversity of a small town in the Black Country Susan Bright’s forthcoming book on the history of food in photography CCCP Cook Book’s cultural exploration of CommunistIndex: December 2016

Intelligence 85 Heidi Swanson on the success of her blog, 101 Cookbooks 88 Creative Brief: John Brown Media’s Chris Parker 91 Champagne house Krug redefines luxury in a cookbook series pairing food and drink

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Technology 97 News from Photokina, plus eight of the best kit releases from Cologne 101 Godox V860 II: a versatile, remarkably good wireless strobe from an indie maker 104 We test the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G80, a Micro Four Thirds for stills and motion Archive 114 Going back 20 years, to Fleur Olby’s take on shooting food

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PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE WORKSHOPS WORKSHOPS WORKSHOPS PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE WORKSHOPS WORKSHOPS WORKSHOPS MAGNUM MAGNUM MAGNUM PHOTOS PHOTOS PHOTOS PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE WORKSHOPS WORKSHOPS WORKSHOPS MAGNUM MAGNUM MAGNUM PHOTOS PHOTOS PHOTOS & & BRITISH & BRITISH BRITISH JOURNAL JOURNAL JOURNAL MAGNUM MAGNUM MAGNUM PHOTOS PHOTOS PHOTOS &&BRITISH &BRITISH BRITISH JOURNAL JOURNAL JOURNAL OF OF PHOTOGRAPHY PHOTOGRAPHY PHOTOGRAPHY &OF &BRITISH &BRITISH BRITISH JOURNAL JOURNAL JOURNAL OF OF OF PHOTOGRAPHY PHOTOGRAPHY PHOTOGRAPHY OF OF OF PHOTOGRAPHY PHOTOGRAPHY PHOTOGRAPHY

All images © Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine.

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Contributors

The Food Issue December 2016 Issue 7854, Volume 163 Cover GB England. Bexhill-on-Sea, 1995-1999 © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos.

Martin Parr For this issue, we showcase an extended collection of Martin Parr’s famed food photography. Described as “a chronicler of our age”, and known for his character-filled, satirical approach to documenting modern society, Parr believes food has a great social history: “When I started, it wasn’t really being explored. Now we all photograph what we eat, all the time.” Looking back at the year, he fondly remembers photographing The Rhubarb Triangle as part of his project for The Hepworth Wakefield, one of the largest exhibitions of his work in the UK. He is planning a trip to Cuba, “to say goodbye to it before it is mobbed by American tourists”.

Paul Harpin Commercial artist and ex-creative director of Haymarket, Paul Harpin has designed the special food issue font for this edition. His vast portfolio includes an eclectic mix of editorial and design projects, including the official programmes for the London 2012 Olympics, a BuyFontsSaveLives campaign that raised more than £30,000 for cancer charities, and more than 300 magazines, including FourFourTwo, Campaign and Creative Review. “You get to know about a lot of things,” he says of working on so many diverse publications. “I’m not bad at pub quizzes and University Challenge.”

Lauren Heinz Former director of London gallery Foto8, Lauren Heinz is also former senior editor of BJP, on which she worked for a year in 2013.

She is now based in LA and continues to work in photographic publishing, research and curation, and is looking forward to spending her first winter in a hot climate: “I’ve been dreaming about spending the holidays in the desert.” She is education producer at Magnum Photos, developing its educational output in the US. For this issue, Heinz interviewed Heidi Swanson about 101 Cookbooks and says of the experience: “Food photography is not so much about the food itself, but the stories behind it.”

British Journal of Photography is proud to announce its new print partner, Park Communications. An award-winning UK company, Park has printed first-class publications for 25 years, working with names such as Printed Pages, Riposte, Rapha Mondial, Christie’s, Pentagram and Mulberry. Park also sponsors events such as It’s Nice That’s Nicer Tuesdays, magCulture’s magCulture Meets, The Photographers’ Gallery’s The Social, and The Association of Photographers’ Annual Awards. BJP is extremely excited about the new possibilities this raises.

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Colophon: December 2016

Damien Demolder The former editor of Amateur Photographer, Damien Demolder is a frequent contributor to BJP. Of this year’s Photokina, he said there was “a real buzz of exciting new cameras and lenses”. He was most excited by Fujifilm’s forthcoming GFX 50S camera, which is likely to go on sale next year: “I think it will make medium format accessible again to a wider audience.” He is judging Sony World Photography’s Open, Youth and National awards this year, and looks forward to running street photography workshops in Birmingham, Manchester and St Albans.

Editorial Director Simon Bainbridge Executive Editor Diane Smyth Online & Social Media Editor Tom Seymour Creative Director Mick Moore Senior Designer Nicky Brown Editorial Assistant Izabela Radwanska Zhang Contributors Rob Alderson, Gerry Badger, Taco Hidde Bakker, Emma Bowkett, Laurence Butet-Roch, David Campany, Federica Chiocchetti, Lucy Davies, Damien Demolder, Martin Evening, Marc Feustel, Jessica Gordon, Michael Grieve, Peter Hamilton, Lauren Heinz, Nadav Kander, David Kilpatrick, Richard Kilpatrick, Stephen McLaren, Donatella Montrone, Gemma Padley, Colin Pantall, Juan Peces, Rachel Segal Hamilton, Maisie Skidmore, Ahmed Shawki, Shana Ting Lipton, Eliza Williams, Paul Wombell, Sophie Wright Editorial Enquiries editorial@bjphoto.co.uk Sales Enquiries sales@apptitudemedia.co.uk Head of Commercial Pax Zoega Advertising Manager Monica Chopra Marketing Director Marc Ghione Head of Events Lisa Farrell Media Consultant Harry Rose CTO Tom Royal Founder & CEO Marc Hartog Subscription Enquiries 01795 414682 bjp@servicehelpline.co.uk Distribution & Marketing Enquiries marketing@apptitudemedia.co.uk

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Agenda

Taschen serves up Salvador Dalí’s characteristically queasy 1973 recipe book in all its lurid glory Les Dîners de Gala Words by Diane Smyth

Our food-themed issue opens with the reprint of a Salvador Dalí culinary classic, Liz Hingley’s portraits of Smethwick folk and their eating traditions, and a nostalgic look at cookbooks.

Plus, official White House photographer Pete Souza on working with President Obama

“Beauty will be edible or not at all,” declared Salvador Dalí in Surrealist magazine Minotaure in December 1933. And his love of food is evident in his work, with titles such as Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), and Autumnal Cannibalism. The melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory were inspired by camembert, and in his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), he explained how to make a hard-boiled egg Venus de Milo. Dalí and his wife Gala were known for their lavish dinners – you can find online footage of their 1941 Dizzy Dalí Dinner, when Gala bottle-fed a lion and the guests were served live frogs.

Thirty-two years later, Dalí published Les Dîners de Gala, a cookbook with 136 recipes from top French restaurants, divided into chapters with titles such as ‘Les je mange gala’ (aphrodisiacs) and ‘Les entre-plats sodomises’ (meats). Some open with revolting quotes, such as those taken from Rabelais’ 16th-century

series of novels, Gargantua and Pantagruel.

“Keep the brains and heart of the goosling constantly damp with a sponge,” reads one.

“When you see him showing signs of weakness, be sure he is done. Take him off the fire and bring him to the table. Rest assured that for each member you pull off he will scream so that he will be eaten alive rather than dead.”

Les Dîners de Gala is lavishly illustrated, with drawings taken from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights and Surrealist painting, as well as lurid, hilariously unappetising photography. A pheasant escapes from its plate; a mountain of crayfish rises up; frog pasties are packed into a frog-shaped dish. This is food as a life-anddeath experience – a far cry from the tasteful cookbook, and now republished in its entirety

by Taschen, priced £45.

“The spectre of death creates supreme delights, salivary expectations, and this is why the greatest of gastronomical refinements consists in eating ‘cooked and living beings’,” reads the opening to Chapter One. “Added to the sado-masochistic pleasure brought by this recipe, the latter confirms us gastronomically in the lofty fundamental law of our Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Rumanian Religion; ie, to swallow the living God as is done in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.” taschen.com

Agenda: In Print

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‘Irina Ovchar, winner of a cooking contest.

She will cook at the XXII Summer Olympics.’ IvanoFrankovsk, Ukrainian SSR. Photograph Vladimir Migovich, 1980 (TASS).

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Chicken Kiev. The Famous Intourist Dish.

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Shashlik. Hunting Tips and Tricks.

Images courtesy Olga and Pavel Syutkin / Fuel.

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Agenda: In Print

A book combining Communist-era recipes and imagery with Russian anecdotes adds up to a fascinating cultural history of an aspirational Soviet Union CCCP Cook Book Words by Shana Ting Lipton

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A factory that manufactured ammunition for Kalashnikovs during the Soviet Union’s war years found an innovative new function during peace time, so the story goes – instead of producing bullets it pumped out macaroni to the same government-regulated size as the lethal cartridges. This amazing tale may be apocryphal, but it’s one of the many legends that help bring the recipes and photographs to life in the CCCP Cook Book.

The culinary tome was the brainchild of London graphic design and publishing company Fuel, founded by Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell. Visually led, it contains recipes for dishes such as ‘herring in a fur coat’, paired with historical accounts and images for context. The photographs are garish and heavily processed, some dating back to the 1920s. “The idea was to produce a Soviet cookbook that was an anti-cookbook – the antithesis of the food porn that is generally in cookbooks today,” says Murray.

Written by Olga and Pavel Syutkin, the images come mainly from cookbooks in their collection, along with some additional pictures from Fuel’s archives. Downsized to better suit a 205×125mm format, the pictures showcase eyebrow-raising setups such as a shiny suckling pig splayed out on a bed of fried

buckwheat. “Before serving, chop off the pig’s head and cut the carcass lengthwise in half,” read the instructions. “Some of the ones from the 1970s and ’80s look quite horrific,” laughs Murray. “Some of the ones from the 1940s and ’50s look painterly.”

The highly stylised pictures of Soviet delights – fried eggs with jam, and meat aspic – were significantly retouched and tinted, as were the shots in English and American book plates of the 1950s. Unlike their Western counterparts, however, the Soviets faced severe food shortages during the period covered in the CCCP Cook Book. As a result, everyday people were forced to make do with whatever ingredients they could get their hands on, making the imagery featured in the book aspirational at best. “It was almost a projection of where the Soviets wanted to be – propaganda to show they could produce the same delicacies as the West,” says Murray.

The dishes are real, however – tried and tested by Olga, who has her own culinary programme. Fuel has reflected this hands-on quality in the book’s design, leaving the spine unbound to allow the book to be laid flat on a kitchen surface. Murray has even sampled ‘herring in a fur coat’, describing it as “really, really nice”. He and Sorrell may be a bit biased, though – with a collection of nearly 1000 photographs of criminal tattoos from Soviet police files under their belts, the Spitalfieldsbased designers could easily be described as Russiaphiles, also publishing books on Soviet space dogs, bus stops and gulag drawings, alongside their books by Jake & Dinos Chapman and Tracey Emin.

CCCP Cook Book: True Stories of Soviet Cuisine, priced £18.95, is in its second reprint and has been well-received, although it has also attracted some critics who believe it portrays Russian culture and the Soviet era in a negative light. Murray defends the publication, arguing it’s “trying to show people the positive side of Russia and how people got by in hard times”. Ultimately, there may be more than meets the eye when it comes to an unappetising salad drowned in mayo, or a bullet-size piece of pasta. “The visual language that is in the photographs and stories shows a unique character that’s been built and forged through incredibly interesting times.” fuel-design.com

Agenda: In Print

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On the menu this issue are David Brandon Geeting’s off-kilter images of narcissistic toast-making and an undercover assignment to the corner shop with Bobby Doherty.

Plus Paloma Rincón’s heatwave tableaux, a culinary reframing of migration by Tanya Houghton and Carl Kleiner’s Swedish loaf story. We start with ‘food art’ from Caitlin Levin and Henry Hargreaves.

Interviews by Sophie Wright

Projects

All images © Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine.

All images © Henry Hargreaves/Caitlin Levin.

At first glance, the intricate shapes and delicate colours of Seasonal Food Scans look like ornate paintings or illustrations. It’s only on closer inspection that the real subject matter becomes clear – an assortment of seasonal fruit, herbs and vegetables placed directly onto a scanner. You can see why one of its creators, Henry Hargreaves, describes himself as a “food artist”.

Hargreaves started out in the restaurant industry before moving onto food photography and says he’s interested in making people look at food differently. He often uses unusual ways of presenting food to help do so, from visualising last meals on death row to creating a series of photographs inspired by Mark Rothko’s famed The Seagram Murals. Inventive and unusual, he hopes this work helps “skin our eyes and make us see food in a new light”.

The starting point for this series was a commission from The Wall Street Journal to create an artwork for their removable wrapping paper spread in their Christmas issue. Working with food stylist Caitlin Levin, his collaborator for over a decade, Hargreaves

started to think about how he could do something surprising with festive food. “We decided we’d like to scan the food so it wasn’t just a photo, to take it to another level,” he explains. “Scanning it made these really neat, mesmerising patterns. The effect is a little surreal – the fall-off is a millimetre from the glass, which you can’t really get with a camera.

Everything is really pushed up on it, so there’s something immediate about it.”

The main challenge was working quickly enough to catch the food while it was fresh, before it wilted or went off – but the project went so well that, after doing the December scan, the pair shot the other 11 months of seasonal food, evolving the commission into a personal project. Scanning each composition in four parts to achieve a mirrored effect, Hargreaves explains that the careful placing of each element is intended to impose order on the unruly elements of nature. The resulting images have a symmetrical quality that both emphasises the imperfections of food and celebrates the artistry of organic design. henryhargreaves.com

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“Food is interesting because everyone has their own complex network of emotions and experiences tied to eating,” says New York-based photographer Bobby Doherty. “We’re all so saturated with images of it – I’m surprised the term ‘food porn’ didn’t exist before recent years. I’m really a pornographer, at best.” His recent shoot for New York Magazine revels in this kind of excess: gaudy grocery-store shelves, crammed with row upon row of produce.

A graduate of New York’s School of Visual Arts, Doherty has been a staff photographer at New York Magazine since 2013. During this time he has taken on a range of different subjects, from portraiture to still life, keen to keep exploring and steer clear of one particular avenue. “I really have no idea what I’m trying to say with photography, or what I want to accomplish as a photographer. I know that if I keep exploring the parts of the process that I love and just work all the time, then whatever it looks like I’m trying to say will sort itself out,” he says.

This particular commission was given to him by the magazine’s director of photography, Jody Quon, to accompany a story about food anxiety. The brief was to capture foods available in local grocery stores that are either unsustainable, contain hidden, unsavoury ingredients, or are damaging the planet.

Originally, the idea was to build a set and shoot in a studio, but Doherty decided to see how easy it was to take photographs of the produce at their source: the grocery shop. Open to testing himself, for Doherty the unknown is an important part of his practice. “As long as I keep feeling challenged, then I feel satisfied,” he says. With the list of foods in hand, the photographer took to the streets on his bike. Two hours and five grocery shops later, he had completed the project.

Shooting without permission, with a large camera and ring flash, Doherty was not the most inconspicuous of customers and had to quickly think of a solution to curb suspicious shop employees. “This was definitely one of those smash-and-grab photo situations where I needed to just act fast and deal with the potential apologies later,” he says.

“A few employees would ask if they could help me, and my go-to answer was always, in a terrible English accent, ‘Where is the quinoa?’. I was just really trying to act like a tourist with intense photo gear who was absolutely blown away by these New York City supermarkets,” he says. “I think this whole thing only worked because New York City grocery stores actually are amazing and the character I invented probably already existed.”

The covert nature of the commission was a definite pull for Doherty. “The whole thing was a blast. I felt like such a little spy. I’d walk out of these stores feeling like I had just scammed some massive corporation, but in reality I had just photographed a bunch of tomatoes.” bobbydoherty.net

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All images Š Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine.

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The Food Issue: Martin Parr

The Food Issue: Portfolio

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I don’t really have a philosophy on food, apart from the fact that it’s a good subject matter and I like eating it,” says Martin Parr. I admire the succinctness of his reply but surely there’s more to it than that? After all, he’s an expert chronicler of all things alimentary and has probably done more than anyone, bar Mark Zuckerberg, to popularise pictures of food. Type “Martin Parr food” into Magnum Photos’ search engine and 5758 results pop up; try “Martin Parr drink” and you’ll find another 1974. His first-ever photo essay, shot in 1967, was a look at the original Harry Ramsden fish and chip restaurant near Leeds; his most recent, shot for the Kunst Haus Wien and exhibited and published by the institution, was a series called Cakes & Balls.

This year he published Real Food, a compendium of his greatest nosh shots taken everywhere from Britain to Sri Lanka, including everything from buttered bread to rotting fruit. In 1995 he published British Food, a queasily brilliant look at the cups of tea, fairy cakes, sausages and peas that make up our great cuisine. “In the early days, I was particularly interested in photographing British junk food because it struck me as a very interesting social history that hadn’t been explored in photography,” he says. “And junk food looks good! It’s on the cusp of looking tasty and being disgusting at the same time. It’s more photogenic than posh food because posh food just looks posh – and we’re used to this because, in all the magazines we buy, we see lots of plates of delicious-looking posh food.”

Even when it’s not his main focus, food runs through Parr’s work like letters through a stick of rock. His most famous images show kids eating ice-cream, or jostling to buy it, in New Brighton in the mid-1980s; the extravagant nibbles and drinks at the Frieze Art Fair are an irresistible element of his 2009 book Luxury. Awkward garden tea parties abound in his 1988 book, Cost of Living, while Mexico from 2006 featured frankly mind-blowing shots of the country’s street food. “You have to remember, I started this years ago, before anyone was photographing food,” he says. “Now everybody’s up to it.”

But if it’s a long-standing subject, he’s ramped up the taste levels over time. In the last two years alone, Parr has shot the Cake & Balls project, published Real Food, photographed The Rhubarb Triangle and A Taste of Mulhouse, published his early 1980s series on Yates’s Wine Lodges and reprinted a lurid cookery book published in 1970 by the South African Banana Control Board. He’s also teamed up with his daughter, the chef Ellen Parr, to open three pop-up restaurants inspired by his images of food: Say Cheese, launched in Tokyo in 2013 and in London in 2014, and Real Food at Photo London in 2015.

“Ellen and Alice [set designer Alice Hodge, with whom Ellen Parr set up The Art of Dining] suggested that they try and create a meal based on my food photography,” wrote Parr on his blog. “Quite a challenge, as it is one of the features of my work that food is shown as you find it for real, rather than the alluring perfection normally displayed in adverts.” He laughs it off when I ask him in person, describing his attitude to photography as “pretty anti-intellectual”, and saying he just likes good food.

Food writer AA Gill once opined, “If you want to know very quickly what a culture is like, eat its food; just go and have breakfast and you will know an enormous amount about the people and the country.” Does Parr have sympathy with that idea? “That makes a lot of sense as an observation,” he says. “Yes, I agree. It’s another layer of information that can be quite interesting and revealing about us as a nation. About people in general and, in particular, regional variations.” martinparr.com 52

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Ice-cream at Nardini’s café, Largs, Scotland, 1999.

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Bexhill-on-Sea, England, 1995-99.

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Victorian Open Day, Trefeglwys, Wales, 2014.

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Seoul, Korea, 2004.

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Mulhouse, France, 2015.

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Merida, 2002. From Mexico (2006).

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New Brighton, England, 1983-85. From The Last Resort (1985).

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Steep Lane Baptist Chapel buffet lunch, Sowerby, England, 1977.

9 & 10 Yates’s Wine Lodges, Newcastle, England, 1983.

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The Egton Show, Egton, England, 2006.

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Luxembourg, 2006.

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Auchan hypermarket, Calais, France, 1988.

From One Day Trip (1989).

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Save-a-lot Supermarket, Memphis, Tennessee, 2006.

All images © Martin Parr /Magnum Photos

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Section ‘eyebrow’: title

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Too many cooks

Gathering together chefs from around the world and pairing champagne with eggs and potatoes, Krug has got a luxurious series of cookbooks off to an intriguing start in a bid to expand its audience, finds Rachel Segal Hamilton

Dressed in his gleaming chef’s tunic, Michael White sits in a New York taxi, champagne bottle in hand, gazing pensively out of the window. On the seat beside him is a box of eggs. A few pages on, Leonardo Vescera juggles eggs in the streets of Paris, scattered cracked shells leaking yolk on the floor by his feet. A dapper-suited Michael O’Hare holds the camera’s gaze, a half-smile on his lips and two chickens in his arms. Sleek but with an allimportant dash of humour, these photographs

by Jenny Zarins feature in Krug x Egg – the latest title in a series of annual high-end cookbooks produced by the champagne house.

Launched in 2015 with Krug x Potato, which included images by renowned food photographer Per-Anders Jörgensen, the series of cookbooks is set to continue and is

freely distributed via “Krug ambassadors” – sommeliers, chefs and others working at restaurants, hotels and wine cellars that serve Krug – and at tastings and events. Each book takes a different ingredient as its starting point before, as the concept goes, “chefs from around the world come together to create a series of dishes that pair beautifully with a Krug Grande Cuvée, using a single, humble ingredient as inspiration”. Alongside the recipes are interviews, essays, illustrations and an array of photography, from still life shots of dishes to reportage of the chefs as they cook, eat or chat, cityscapes and individual portraits.

Rough luxury The book series is part of a strategy to redefine the champagne house’s image that is being Intelligence: Commission

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spearheaded by Sonia Voskoboinikoff, Krug’s international marketing and communications director, who joined the company in 2013.

“I’m trying to make the brand desirable for a larger audience,” she says. “Krug already has a reputation as the best, so we can have a bit of fun, we can allow ourselves to do crazy things that maybe other houses can’t do, to express the prestige of the house in a more contemporary way.”

She wants to emphasise the pleasurable, emotional experience of drinking champagne by creating interesting “Krug pairings” – events and initiatives matching Krug with music and food. Central to Voskoboinikoff’s vision is a concept she terms “rough luxury” – a more relaxed approach to luxury born of a tension between tradition and innovation, urban and countryside. “It came up as a result of analysis we did that showed that people these days aren’t interested in showing off,” she says.

“Today there’s a trend for ‘understatement is a statement’, as we say at Krug. It’s really this value that you see in the luxury world that’s about authenticity and depth. That is what the house is about.”

These thoughts were at the fore when she came across Krug x Tomato, a project

“It’s really this value that you see in the luxury world that’s about authenticity and depth”

from 2013 in which chefs from Hong Kong created tomato-based dishes to pair with Krug.

The whole concept was there. Voskoboinikoff recalls one image in particular that inspired her: a shot showing the chefs posing as though at a 10-pin bowling alley, using tomatoes as bowling balls and bottles of Krug as pins. “It was like a movie pastiche, she says. “I thought, ‘This is outrageous, I love it!’. So I called the creative gentleman in Hong Kong [who had commissioned the project], who was very young and doing whatever he wanted to do.

I said to him: ‘I like what you’re doing, do you mind if I steal the idea and we do it on a worldwide scale?’”

A month later the two met in Paris.

Lee Paul Coad, the creative director behind Krug x Tomato, was back in the UK after seven years working in Hong Kong as Asia art director for the Financial Times. It was there that he had developed a relationship with Krug while working on another standalone project, Krug x Truffle, as well as invites, menus and other brand imagery.

“We set about refining the product and using some of the most respected chefs globally,” Coad says. “The ingredients for these two publications were designed to be Intelligence: Commission

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Opposite: chef Yosuke Suga.

All images © Jenny Zarins/Krug.

something of a surprise and more in keeping with the brand. Many champagnes can pair truffles or caviar, but we wanted it to be more authentic and showcase the skill of the chefs, hence the ingredients we used: the potato and the egg.”

The concept of the single ingredient echoes Krug’s approach to champagne because, unlike other champagne houses, Krug presses each plot individually. In choosing the ingredient for each book, Voskoboinikoff and Coad stuck to a fundamental “ABC” rule: Anything But Caviar. Beyond that, they looked for something versatile enough to work for chefs based in different parts of the world.

“When I started this project, my nightmare was that they’d all come back with mashed potato because the only brief we gave to the chefs was ‘potato’,” she says, laughing. “They sent over their recipes, and before I read them I was so worried they would all do the same thing – because I was foolish and didn’t realise how creative they were.”

Another expression of this “tribute to individuality”, says Voskoboinikoff, lies in the photographers chosen for each book. Coad had worked with Jörgensen before on brand images for Krug and had been following Zarins after seeing her work for Russell Norman’s book Spuntino. “I love working with photographers who have a point of view, people who have a style and a take on the world that is theirs and theirs alone,” he says.

“Both Per-Anders Jörgensen and Jenny Zarins have that. Both of them are able to capture not just the chef and their food but also the personality they exude.”

And although Krug’s brand guidelines inevitably determined the structure and design of the books, when it came to photography Coad says he had a lot of freedom. “As a client, they’re a dream,” he says of the champagne house. “We wanted each issue to be not only about a different ingredient but also a different visual direction. This ensures we’re never pigeonholed into one look; we can move forward every year. We wanted to use a different photographer to do each issue – to use a slightly ridiculous analogy, we wanted the photographer to feel like it was the food equivalent of the Pirelli Calendar and that they could impose their visual style on the book.”

This is apparent in the two books released so far, each of which has a distinct flavour.

Krug x Potato feels more consistent across geographical locations, for example, with the chef portraits shot against simple black backgrounds. Krug x Egg, meanwhile, takes us outside the kitchen with a nod to the cities its subjects call home, with a sweeping view across the Seine here or a crowded Hong Kong street scene there.

Spontaneity and preparation Production of each book is a six-month undertaking, says Coad, but the shoots themselves take place over several weeks at the start of the year – one of the few quiet times for chefs. For Krug x Egg, Zarins came on board with the project in mid-November, so things had to move fast to get everyone organised for the shoots in New York, Hong Kong and Paris. Fortunately, she was keen from the start. “Lee emailed me and explained the idea,” she says. “I love those kind of jobs where there’s a bit more of a story and a variety of work. It sounded fantastic – and it turned out to be exactly that.”

The pair met up in London beforehand to brainstorm the idea of “what you can do with an egg”. “It was fun drawing sketches and discussing visual ideas,” says Zarins.

“What has ended up in the book is just a small part of the crazy ideas we had.” One that didn’t make the cut, for example, was a shot of Michael White frying an egg over steam rising from gratings in the New York streets.

“We’d recced it in the morning and found one close to his restaurant, but by the time we went back later there was no steam coming out,” she says. “It just didn’t work.”

The still life recipe pictures and the portraits were shot on separate days and each presented their own challenges. The chefs had decided the dishes they’d be cooking beforehand, but “even if you read one of these recipes you wouldn’t have a clue what they looked like”, according to Zarins. And while some knew exactly how they would present their dishes, others improvised. “I think that applies to the whole project – a lot of planning and a lot of prepping, but then equally being open and just going with it,” she adds.

Fortunately, this approach also allowed for some flexibility. Locations and schedules were pre-decided, for example – in some surprisingly gritty spots – but what happened on the day was left open. In this, Jörgensen got the series of cookbooks off to a good start with Krug x Potato, as he’s always keen to “give some kind of crack where life gets in”.

“I’m really open to these things that happen and I try to bring them into the pictures,” he says. “You need to be open and prepared for the unexpected, and seize the moment when it shows up.”

The gatherings were photoshoots first and foremost, but they were also gastronomic occasions in themselves, with food and entertainment laid on. “We were in a kitchen studio so we’d be sitting around having lunch, drinking champagne,” Coad says. “It was wonderful. Everyone cooking, everyone tasting each other’s food, trying ingredients that some people hadn’t used before. One of my favourite moments was watching Leonardo Viscera cook pasta from scratch. As a Michelin-star chef, he could have easily had all the pasta preprepared when he came into the kitchen that morning, as it was only for a photoshoot. But for him the photo was merely the end result.

The most important part was the love and dedication that went into his end product.”

As well as providing visual material for Krug’s marketing and PR purposes, the books exist to celebrate the Krug ambassadors featured in it and to build a community around the brand. “It’s a way to have an even deeper relationship with them and between them,” says Voskoboinikoff. “The book is a tool that gives them greater visibility. On our website, where we have all the portraits of the chefs from Krug x Egg, and also in the restaurant, they have the book and can give it to their consumers as a gift. Usually for a couple of weeks they’ll do some pairings [of Krug with dishes using the single ingredient]. It’s up to them to use it the way they want.

“I love that part of the project. Krug is about connections. Champagne isn’t something you drink by yourself in front of your fridge, crying and totally depressed.

Champagne is about pleasure, it’s about joy, it’s about sharing.”

Zarins, who has since shot other imagery for Krug, found working with the chefs one of the most rewarding aspects of the project.

“These chefs love the brand and they were excited to be part of the book, so there was this positive energy all around,” she says. “There’s something about the intensity of their work that fascinates me. [As a photographer], you take a picture and, whether you frame it on a wall or it’s on the cover of a magazine, you can look at it and come back to it and you’ve got time. With food, it’s there and then it’s gone.”

Unsurprisingly, given its creators’ enthusiasm, the series of cookbooks is set to continue. “It will continue for as long as we have fun with it and the creativity is there,” says Voskoboinikoff. “We already know the ingredient for next year and the year after.

From what I see of the dynamic and the enthusiasm it creates, we’ll do it for a few years more for sure.” krug.com jennyzarins.com fool.se leepaulcoad.com

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