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Every other month, I spend a day with a chef. Cuisine Magazine have engaged me for features and columns for about 8 years now, and it’s a gig I continue to treasure - for the people it brings into my work week, as well as for the creative challenge and generally delicious post-shoot snacks. These images were made for a feature by chef Jonny Taggart, Executive Chef of LTD in Pōneke, who created his native Canadian frybread tacos for a Wellington on a Plate popup a while back. Cuisine editor Kelli Brett had sampled the tacos at an event in Tāmaki Makaurau previously, and she was dead keen to share the recipe with her readership. Editorial photography is a little different than the main kinds of work I do. I’m comfortable responding to a precise brief, creating something largely preconceived, and working with a curated and polished subject. Magazine work is much more open. I work regularly with Art Director Fiona Lascelles, and we have a rhythm where we consider the look and feel of the of a feature and the balance between photographs of the chef doing their thing and also the thing itself - generally, dishes of really quite fancy food. When I get to the shoot, I’m operating from a well thumbed playbook - finding the angles and augmenting the light, and getting to know my subject. This shoot took place in an extremely utilitarian commercial kitchen, with absolutely zero natural light, and nothing pretty about it. This work is not about the space Jonny inhabits, but about the precision and intensity of his attention, the emotional texture of his hands at work and the billow of dust he kicks up with his kneading. And the food this time wasn’t fancy - but it was extraordinarily well crafted. Photographing any kind of craftsperson is generally replete with small, decisive moments, when the frame and the action are synchronised to provoke our response. My joy at photographing Jonny Taggart at work comes from the integrity of his gestures, the stories we’ve shared during our day together, and the frisson of excitement when the steam rises and the dust flies - decisively telling us what this mahi feels like. A funny thing happens during the process of shooting, and then editing the images. I really become connected to my subject, first through listening to their stories, and then looking with an almost surgical assessment at them in the photographs later, there’s something about every person I shoot that, as ick as this might sound, kind of lands in my heart. I fall a bit in love with their humanity. I get a sore face from smiling at them so much while I’m editing. It’s a slightly one-sided relationship, as I’m spending a lot more time with them than they are with me, but I think it’s reflected in the way I show them to the world. With dignity, and a small bit of insight into what makes them worth spending time with.
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