Work, honesty, light

Fragment #65

Returning to work after nearly two months away was a foreboding prospect. It was an absence that was perhaps closer to seven months than the seven-week marker that walked me back to the day that I lost my mother, such was the amount being juggled long before that date came to pass. Also, I was going back to much more than just work – a return to the rhythms and needs of a family; to my daughter’s side as she revised for exams; to the love and support of my wife and care for another parent. Reverting also to more than just patterns of necessity and added value, but to ones of pleasure – something in which my life had long ago started to become increasingly deficient – and rediscovering the initially guilty happiness of reading and writing, self-care and the company of friends. Life is a constant balance of how we yield our time and energy. Our capacity for love, however, seems exponentially capable of encompassing more and more. As this heart beat loudly beside just one, it became yet more swollen by the absence of others – an imaginary web of unseen veins and arteries threading invisible red lines between one vessel and another. Like one of those in-flight international route trackers, they show lines of travel and yet serve to confirm neither distance nor destination, but to remind us that we are forever connected to an idea of home.

This post was drafted two weeks ago. I’ve not been willing to trust my writing until now, fearing that the same anxieties of that person who was living in the distress and disorder of previous months were continuing to hijack the reflection of this mind and soul of today. Honesty can be messy; it can coil itself around life in an often uneasy manner, sometimes like gum that can’t be teased from hair, and sometimes like shit that can’t simply be scraped from the tread of a shoe. The most uncomfortable truth of returning to work is that I had so little interest for it, which, for a creative, is the hardest of circles to square. For a photographer to deliver something of real value to a client, he needs more than just the muscle-memory coordination of eye, mind and hand. Good creative work needs that aforementioned swollen heart to be in service. A brain needs capacity to think. Mouth and ears must function well to transform a brief into a story. One can hide one’s physical self behind a camera, but risks revealing everything in the resulting image.

Any plaudits for the work of a food photographer are often wrongly or at least not evenly attributed. Credit is due first to Mother Nature, then to the skill of a chef or stylist, and then to the available light with which one chooses to work. With these in place, one can start to think about the photo. There are many times I have observed a chef looking at their food through the prism of photography to see a dish they recognise and admire more than their own creation. Like Narcissus, the reflection of beauty can be deceptively bewitching. On a good day, the photographer is sometimes no more than a trusted custodian for the pool of water into which others will stare.

And so I photographed Sicilian winter tomatoes on an overcast Wednesday at the beginning of May in the dining room of a west-London restaurant. There followed fresh peas with mint on a bed of ricotta and toasted sourdough. Beautiful produce; the delicate but sure touch of a chef friend; diffused natural light from a window facing south. It felt like I knew what I was doing once again and that I was enjoying what I was doing once again – lost in admiration of reflections and the fulfilment of an honest day’s work.