It’s Food Photography Week here at B&H Photo, so our guests on this week’s B&H Photography Podcast are California-based food photographer Meika Ejaisi, and from her new studio in Boulder Colorado, Cherry Li of Cherry Food Photography. This isn’t the first food-centric show we’ve produced over the five-plus years we’ve been recording the B&H Photography Podcast. A quick search of our archive of past episodes revealed three other shows in which food and food photography were the topics of the week.
Food Photography and Still Life, with Emma Ressel
As recently as March of this year we recorded Food Photography and Still Life, with Emma Ressel. Ressel, who is based in Maine and counts New York magazine and Refinery29 among her clients, takes a painterly approach to food photography, some of which possess Dutch Master qualities. Many of her more personal works include food as it decays, and she once spent an art residency photographing the carcass of a decaying whale. (Ressel’s subject choices often give new meaning to the concepts of perseverance and dedication.)
John Harris and I also spoke about the type of camera gear Ressel uses (a Toyo-View 4x5 field camera or Nikon DSLRs), as well as the types of lighting she incorporates into her commercial and personal photography.
Food Photography and Food Styling
We broadcast Food Photography and Food Styling with photographer Chelsea Kyle and food stylist Drew Aichele during the second week of May 2020. Having recorded this episode of the B&H Photography podcast a couple of months into the COVID-19 shutdown, we spoke at length about how the sudden shift in our collective lives was affecting business and how they were finding their way through unchartered waters.
The fact that Kyle and Aichele are a couple, and at the time of the recording about to become husband and wife, added additional layers of individual and “coupled” insights into the creative process. Collaboration is a recurring theme among our podcasts, and this podcast can be included on the list. John, in particular, lights up when talking about the collaborative process, and this show was no exception.
Eating Delancey: A Celebration of Jewish Food
One of the more entertaining podcasts we have recorded—food-related or otherwise―was Eating Delancey: A Celebration of Jewish Food. This episode featured photographers Aaron Rezny and Jordan Schaps. Rezny is a veteran New York-based food photographer who counts Nestlé, Duncan Hines, Kellogg's, Russell Stover, Nabisco, and Applebee’s among past and present clients. His work has also appeared in Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, New York magazine, and other publications.
Schaps was the original Director of Photography at New York magazine. He’s also an author and professor of photography at the School of Visual Arts, in New York, and has produced photo shoots for inStyle, GQ, and Lincoln Motors. Rezny and Schaps are also close friends and have been creative collaborators for decades (there’s that collaborator word again!).
In this episode of the B&H Photography Podcast, Rezny and Schaps discuss the making of a book that lives up to its title through photographs lovingly captured by Rezny. In addition to his photographs, the book is chock full of essays written by a Who’s Who list of celebrities, actors, comedians, authors, and other notables with opinions on Eastern European-style “Jewish” food. At the very least, this was one of the most humorously informative podcasts we have produced on the topic of food.
Are you familiar with any of these episodes of the B&H Photography Podcast? If so, which of these episodes was your favorite and why? We’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic in the Comments field, below.
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