Eat My Art

by Brigitte Karnilavicius

A painter uses a certain brush to get the perfect stroke, a singer hones her voice to reach high E above middle C, and a food stylist sprays ice cream with water to keep it gleaming. Every artist has a way of creating the perfect product, but food stylists have to create pieces that are so appealing people will actually want to eat them.

When you see a shot of a batch of cookies in a magazine, it’s not as simple as someone baking cookies and taking a picture of them. There is a lot more to those simple looking cookies than meets the eye.

“Anytime you’re presenting something you have to start with the idea that you need good composition, good textures and colours, so there are always all of these elements of art,” says Kester Birch, a Toronto-based food stylist.

Food photo shoots and television shows not only have food stylists, they also have art directors, assistant art directors, photographers, lighters – an entire food army.

“The way I work, we’re all on the same team. We’re all trying to get to the same point to make the client happy,” says food stylist Marianne Wren. “I don’t believe that I am more important than the photographer or the art director is more important than me. The art director has certain parameters that they need to stick by and they have a certain vision in their head and we’re all working together to make the client go ‘I love that shot,’” says Wren.

Food stylists use many different tricks to have the product come across as perfect. Some of them spray foods with oil to have them looking like they’re fresh off the grill, when really, they could have been sitting on a table all day.

A common trick for Birch and other food stylists is multiple pictures of the same product. Birch says he’ll do “30 of the same thing and keep the best ones.”

Whether food stylists are hired to do the packaging for a product to be sold at the grocery store, or a simple soup for a recipe in a magazine, they always have to keep the client in mind. Most clients want the picture of the food to make its viewer’s lips smack and their mouths drool so they will want to buy the product.

“There’s a certain creative freedom, but most art directors come with an idea of what they want to see and the stylist acts as the technician,” says Birch.

These limits are different in every food styling circumstance because the client always wants something different. It’s not as if a food stylist goes to work everyday, primps a hamburger for a shot, and goes home. They make every thing from leaning towers of hamburgers for an editorial to luscious mounds of ice cream for an ice cream carton.

“In things like packaging you have certain parameters that you need to adhere to, like this is where the logo goes,” says Wren. She says colour coordination between the photograph and the other packaging elements is one issue that needs special consideration when setting up food shots. “You can’t have something of that colour in this space because you can’t have orange against orange.”
In the past food styling was a more difficult job because cameras had not yet reached the digital age. The creative team would have to wait for photos to be developed and brought back before they could even know if they were any good. These days, food stylists don’t have to worry as much about their work melting or becoming stale under bright lights.

“It was worse before digital. Now with digital things aren’t sitting next to the light and you’re not waiting for film to come back because you have it right in front of you and it’s on the computer,” says Wren.

Birch says it is important for pastry stylists to have a good relationship with the photographer who is capturing their work. “Natural daylight and lighting will increase the look of something that is otherwise mundane . . . Sometimes it’s more the photographer, how well they can light something, as opposed to the food stylist and what they do to it in terms of glazing it or puffing it up.”
Birch and Wren both say it is a difficult task to break into the food styling industry.

“Someone’s not going to hire you sight-unseen,” says Wren. “They want to work with you a couple of times before they hire you for a big project.”

Much like any other artists food stylists have   to knock on doors, make phone calls, and make their presence known just to get a job. They may put together the picture of that frozen pizza you might have for lunch, but they’re not credited on the package.

“Once you get your name to everyone, it is like being an artist: you have shows and then people come and see your work.”

Hopefully, none of them will try to eat it.