Would you lay down inside of this inflatable sculpture that reacts to wind? I sure would! Created by Pneuhaus (instagram), this public sculpture has a bunch of moving parts that react to the wind. …
Pneuhaus’s wild inflatable sculptures
New troll sculpture arrives in West Seattle with more planned around the region
The Fremont Troll now has company in West Seattle’s Lincoln Park.
Cass County Fair FFA Photography
FFA Photography Awards
Champion FFA Photography – Makayla Atkinson – Atlantic FFA – Parent: Angela Atkinson – Trophy Sponsor: Saeugling Family
Reserve Champion Photography – Leah Ohms – CAM FFA – Parents: Matt and Carrie Ohms – Trophy Sponsor: Boes Repair
Cass County Fair FFA Floriculture Contest
Cass County Fair FFA Floriculture Container
Champion – Collin Evans – Griswold FFA – Parents: Ryan and Jessie Evans – Trophy Sponsor: Kevin and Donna Blair
Reserve Champion – Alyson Dreager – Griswold FFA – Parents: Mike Dreager and Becky Hansen – Trophy Sponsor: Boes Repair
Cass County Fair FFA Floriculture Hanging Basket
Champion – Trista Swain – Griswold FFA – Parents: Doug and Sarah Swain – Trophy Sponsor: Don and Amy Smith
Reserve Champion – Kailey Swain – Griswold FFA – Parents: Doug and Sarah Swain – Trophy Sponsor; Kevin and Donna Blair
Results
FFA Static and Floriculture Container Class
Natalie Behnken – Blue – CAM FFA
Parker Brock – White – Atlantic FFA
Alyson Dreager – Lavender
Collin Evans – Purple – Griswold FFA
Ryleigh Harrison – Red – Griswold FFA
Lily Johnson – Blue – Atlantic FFA
Rio Johnson – Blue – Atlantic FFA
Emma Mundorf – Blue – Griswold FFA
BrookLynne Peterson – Blue – Griswold FFA
BrookLynne Peterson – Blue – Griswold FFA
Abbi Richter – Red – Atlantic FFA
Kailey Swain – Blue – Griswold FFA
Trista Swain – Blue – Griswold FFA
Collin Evans – Blue – Griswold FFA
Ryleigh Harrison – Blue – Griswold FFA
Lily Johnson – Blue – Atlantic FFA
Rio Johnson – Red – Atlantic FFA
Kailey Swain – Lavender – Griswold FFA
Trista Swain – Purple – Griswold FFA
CFD Old West Museum announces Art Uncork’d with Sarah Konrad
CHEYENNE – Join the Cheyenne Frontier Days Old West Museum in a night of creativity, relaxation and linocut printmaking adventures at Art Uncork’d at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 14.
Perspective | Can you belong to a place that never belonged to you?
NEW YORK — The landscape seen in photographs made by Shelley Niro, an Indigenous artist in Canada, is worn low by ancient glaciers, and the rivers are fringed with thick forests. Everything about this place felt distinctly familiar, and alien to me, a place where I once lived, a place I left long ago.
Niro’s images, part of a 2015 work called “Battlefields of My Ancestors,” went straight to where memory and emotion are entangled, where words like place and home and the possessive “mine” all seem inadequate to describe one’s feeling for the land. The work is included in an exhibition, “Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch,” on view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian Heye Center.
But the word Mohawk, the name of a people and a river in Upstate New York where they once made their home, was even more arresting. Niro, born in Niagara Falls, N.Y., grew up there and on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, Canada. So how is she also Mohawk, and why did she photograph the Mohawk River? A foolish thing to ask unless history has been erased.
Niro’s ancestors lived where my family lived, in the same watershed of the Mohawk River, two centuries before my parents arrived there. Niro’s people are Kanyen’kehá:ka, or Mohawk, and many of them allied with the British during the Revolutionary War. When George Washington won the war, the newly minted Americans kicked the Mohawks off their native land. They resettled in different places, including near Niagara Falls and across the Canadian border in the Six Nations Reserve of the Grand River.
When I was a boy, a Mohawk woman came to our school to tell my almost entirely White classroom about her people. She talked about where they lived, what they ate and what their homes once looked like, but I don’t remember her saying anything about being evicted from the land. She was speaking to children, and she didn’t speak of genocide or displacement. It’s a dim memory, both sweet and sad, and I realize now that the success of historical erasure also removed anything that might have pricked the conscience of a child.
Even as, somewhere north and west of me, a Mohawk girl named Shelley was coming of age, this woman spoke in the past tense, about things long ago, things that had seemingly disappeared. And because they were gone, there was nothing to stumble over, nothing to trouble ideas like place, home and “mine.”
And yet that was my first response upon seeing Niro’s depiction of the old ancestral land of the Mohawks: mine. This is a place I know, and a landscape that inveigled its way into my memory more thoroughly and deeply than I could have acknowledged 10, 20 or 30 years after leaving it. I have no legal, historic, ethnic, residential or professional connection to this place, just memory, but when I saw her river I thought of it as my river.
Niro’s art, which speaks in the present tense and affirms the continuity of the Mohawk people, is haunted by the displacement of her ancestors. She remembers her father speaking of the lost Mohawk lands, recounting stories told by his grandmother. Neither Niro’s father nor her great grandmother ever lived there, so their memories must have been a mixture of anecdotes and fragments of anecdotes stitched into poetic coherence by imagination — like most memories of things that happen before the horizon of our individual consciousness.
If they hadn’t seen the Mohawk River since they were forced to leave it for other shores, Niro’s kin may have remembered a place before it was disfigured by bridges, barges, locks and pollution. They certainly remembered a river different from the one I experienced, an often muddy and dirty waterway dotted with crumbling factories, a river that flooded almost every spring when the ice broke up, threatening the historic neighborhoods of old Schenectady. The Kanyen’kehá:ka almost certainly knew the land where the Dutch wanted to build was prone to flooding when they allowed them to create a settlement there — the name Schenectady is derived from a Mohawk word meaning “beyond the pines” — in 1662.
Not far from where we lived, General Electric (where my father worked) dumped more than a million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River, north of its confluence with the Mohawk, which was also polluted by industry and the salt washing off the roads every winter. The river was something to cross over, not swim in. My mother, in moments of exasperation, would threaten “to go jump in the Mohawk,” by which she meant take her final exit from the burden of family and motherhood.
Sometimes rivers are seen defiled by electrical power lines in Niro’s work but more often they are a source of other, more intangible powers. The Niagara River was a sacred site for rituals, and Niagara Falls appears with a thundering muteness in a haunting 2015 video called simply “Niagara.” An idealized, unnamed river is rendered as a source of life and purpose in a 2013 painting “Wishing a River,” in which a woman’s gaze seems to meet a river’s unseen headwaters in the far distance of an idyllic landscape.
The last time I saw the Mohawk River, just a few months ago, it was cleaner than it was when I was a child. And I had matured considerably into the wisdom of what it means to love a river. The art of Native and Indigenous people is often bound up with the loss of land and displacement, and because Niro’s work is so closely connected to the land where I once lived, I felt accused by it, implicated in the tragedy that befell the Mohawk people at the end of the Revolutionary War.
What follows will read to some like an effort to avoid that moral conundrum, but it is also an honest effort to preserve something vital for my own existence, a love of the land, a love of rivers. We are thrown into the world and land where our mothers ground us. It may seem to us, at some point in our lives, that the place where we land is beautiful, that it is home and we may say, “this river, these hills, are mine.” The claim isn’t legal or contractual or binding on any other person.
And it isn’t even sensible. For if we are truly at home, the land isn’t ours. We are of it.
None of this has anything to do with the larger, unresolved questions raised by centuries of theft and broken treaties and forced displacement. I don’t know how to solve that. But if I took something essential from Niro’s work — and yes, it may be self-serving and not what she intended — it is this: Loving a river is never wrong.
Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch Through Jan. 1 at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian Heye Center. americanindian.si.edu.
Ellicottville Fine Art and Craft Market to feature the area’s best talent next weekend
ELLICOTTVILLE — This Labor Day weekend will feature the inaugural Ellicottville Fine Art and Craft Market on the lawn of the 1887 Building at the corner of Washington and Jefferson streets.
The Tri-County Arts Council (TCAC), in collaboration with Ellicottville Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club of Ellicottville, welcome the public to this new event where people who appreciate real creative talent will have the opportunity to meet local fine artists and craftspeople whose works play an important role in promoting economic growth in their communities.
The event runs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on both days, Sept. 2 and 3.
Many of the featured artists have international reputations in galleries and fine art shows throughout the United States and abroad.
Paula Bernstein, TCAC executive director, said all participating artists and craftspeople have been selected for this event after careful review by the arts council. While some artists are TCAC members, others are people in the community whose work the TCAC has come to know and love.
“We wanted to try something new in Ellicottville, though the event does have some history in the village,” she said. “Fall Festival was originally put together as an art festival. We wanted to bring that back and have this be a juried art festival.”
Sean Huntington, a participating painter from Olean and TCAC exhibitions coordinator, said this event is a sampling of the works of some of the best artists and fine craftspeople in the region.
“The market is kind of the same idea as when the artists and crafters held their shows at Holiday Valley, in the past, but this market is located right in the heart of town,” he said. “We want the village residents and people who visit Ellicottville to get to know the Tri-County Arts Council.”
Huntington said they are excited to showcase the range of talent in the region, and they hope the market is a success so they can keep bringing the event back.
“We want them to know the artists and crafters are here and they service the county,” he added. “Our hope is to make people aware that other fine art activities are going on outside of Ellicottville that they may want to get involved in.”
Huntington said there’s an outlet for high-end art in Ellicottville. He said, with all the beautiful homes in town, people need real art.
“People seeking real art and high-quality craftwork can come to the market where they can meet the artist or craftsperson and buy a piece of artwork that has meaning behind it,” he said. “They can actually get to know the person who has created the piece with their own hands.”
Huntington said markets and fairs are a great way to start a collection of art from local artists. He said people will have a lot of one-of-a-kind artwork to choose from at Ellicottville’s Fine Art and Craft Market, so it’s a good place for them to get a start on their holiday shopping.
Approximately 20 artists and crafters from Allegany, Cattaraugus and Chautauqua counties, as well as Wellsboro, Pa., are participating in the market including painters Huntington, Jud Brown, Robin Zefers Clark, Denise Drummond and Mikel Wintermantel; Theresa Heinz, mixed media; Michael Weishan, photography; Eileen Weishan, fiber art; Lisa Conn, sculpture; jewelry artists Bonnie Hedden, Lisa Hodge and Kaylee Taylor; Keith McKale, wood carvings and sculpture; Michelle Hoff and Karen Fitzpatrick, mosaics and glass; John Crandall, leather; and potters Pam Gifford, Ed Green and Peter Midgley.
The Fine Art and Craft Market will be held rain or shine. There is no admission charge. For more details, contact Huntington at sdhuntingtonartscouncil@gmail.com or visit tricountyartscouncil.org/ellicottville-fine-arts.
‘It’s a fleeting moment in my daughter’s life’: Kelley Dallas’s best phone picture
It was only last year, but Kelley Dallas is already a little nostalgic for her daughter’s time with her violin. Emmy, pictured here practising on her bedroom floor in the mid-morning light, had begun playing aged six, three years earlier.
The Colorado-based photographer has developed a careful eye for these shafts of light now, their ability to highlight a subject becoming something of a signature style for her. “My eye has developed to seek these slices out, but they create extremes that an iPhone automatically tries to balance out,” Dallas says. “I didn’t want that, so I manually brought down the exposure to correctly capture the shaft of light and to let the rest fall into shadow.”
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Her advice for fellow parents hoping to photograph their own child in a similarly poignant moment is to resist the temptation to ask them to pose. “Just capture what they’re doing,” Dallas says. “Think of the little things that speak to their personality, that tell a story of who they are. It’s a more documentarian, more authentic approach.”
With Emmy having since quit the instrument – these days she prefers volleyball and arts and crafts – Dallas is grateful to have taken this photograph when she did. “It speaks to capturing a brief, fleeting moment in time,” she says.
Choreographers Make Their Own Kind of Administrative Dance
“Spreadsheets? That’s just the choreography of numbers,” says a participant in a program that envisions an array of approaches to administrative needs.
Nobody becomes a choreographer because they love spreadsheets. The business side of dance — budgeting, marketing, scheduling and fund-raising — can seem very far away from the in-the-body creative work of the studio and the stage.
During the 20th-century dance boom, dance companies often formalized that divide. Relatively plentiful arts funding meant successful choreographers could hand over administrative duties to executive directors and their well-staffed teams. Maintaining a church-and-state separation even became a kind of artistic virtue: A working choreographer shouldn’t let the practical distract from the creative. Recently, the choreographer Dominic Moore-Dunson asked a mentor, an established dance maker, for marketing advice. The mentor told him not to worry: “Your job is just to make the art.”
But that is now no longer feasible, or even desirable, for most choreographers. Today’s dance makers are far more likely to operate on a project-to-project basis because of limited resources, the desire for creative flexibility, or both. That means they’re often their own administrators — spreadsheets are very much a part of their everyday life. But the dance field’s business “best practices” are decades old. And though there are a variety of grants and residencies to bolster choreographers’ creative endeavors, for a long time, there was little support for the less-glamorous work of dance administration.
In 2020, the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron in Ohio began the Creative Administration Research program to address that gap. The initiative challenges the perception of arts administration as a duty to be endured or delegated. Instead, said Christy Bolingbroke, the National Center for Choreography’s founding and artistic director, it proposes that choreographers use their considerable creative powers to help imagine structures better suited to their needs. “It’s expanding artists’ creative practice beyond, just, ‘I make dances,’” Bolingbroke said.
So far, the Creative Administration Research program has helped 21 dance artists, including Moore-Dunson, envision an array of different approaches to administration. A newly announced $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation means the program will be able to mount a second phase over the next three years.
Most of the big-picture administrative challenges choreographers face, including scarce funding and dwindling audiences after pandemic shutdowns, aren’t unique to dance. But dance artists may be particularly well equipped to handle them.
“There’s no playbook to follow in making a dance, or in dance thinking,” said the choreographer Silas Riener, who, with his longtime collaborator Rashaun Mitchell, participated in the first round of the Akron program. “Which means dance artists, generally, are problem solvers. So there’s a lot of ingenuity in the field, and now you’re seeing that in the administrative practices.”
Like its older peer, Florida State University’s Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron offers several artistic programs and residencies. But building better infrastructure for dance has been a special focus for the Akron hub since its incorporation in 2015. Instead of following the typical residency model — we’ll give you some money and a space, you make a dance — it aims to strengthen the larger dance ecosystem. “We look at the foundations that people get to dance on and figure out how to fill in some of the cracks, so other people can have better footing,” Bolingbroke said.
The Creative Administration Research program pairs choreographers with what it calls thought partners, collaborators who might be business-minded arts administrators, funders or presenters, but who are also often working artists. The composer and educator Byron Au Yong, who has been a thought partner for the choreographers Raja Feather Kelly and Takahiro Yamamoto, said the breadth of that adviser pool sets the initiative apart.
“There are business and marketing consultants out there, but unless you have an embodied, lived experience of working in the arts in the United States, how can you advise a dance artist?” Au Yong said. “There will always be a disconnect.”
During a series of online retreats, each team reflects on how the choreographer makes work and what kind of structure might best support their process. The program has also hosted two summits, bringing several dozen artists and leaders to the center’s University of Akron home to share their insights into creative administration. (And to dance together — or to “physicalize their administrative thinking and dreaming,” as a news release said.)
For some participating choreographers, the initiative has prompted dramatic change. Banning Bouldin, who uses they/them pronouns, formerly ran their Nashville organization, New Dialect, as a conventional dance company, though their goal was to create a dance hub for the city. A thought partner, John Michael Schert, helped Bouldin recognize that the company model “only fit maybe 40 percent of what we were doing,” Bouldin said, and that it was hampering the organization’s community organizing and engagement efforts. Now, rather than employing a small roster of full-time dancers, New Dialect dedicates more resources to professional development workshops, residencies and performance production.
“Philosophically, we made a really meaningful shift,” Bouldin said. “We’re serving more artists and more of the community in a way that’s financially sustainable.”
Rosie Herrera, the director of Rosie Herrera Dance Theater, found that Creative Administration Research affirmed many of her existing ways of working. Through conversations with thought partners and other artists in the program, she said, she realized that “as a Latina in Miami, who started out just making work with her friends,” she had intuitively avoided many “best practice” traps.
“There was no hierarchy in the company, and we’d always done things like bartering — you know, ‘I’ll dance in your drag show, you do costumes for my show,’” Herrera said. The program allowed her to “choreograph time for reflection,” to articulate how those practices had grown out of the inclusive values that also shape her artistic process.
Administrative insights sometimes seep back into creative work, too. Bouldin found that letting go of the company director role altered their perspective on studio practice; though they still choreograph, they now feel they’re a facilitator more than a leader. “I’ve gone from a sort of outside or in-front-of relationship to the artists that we’re working with to being inside of these teams and the groups, part of the community,” they said.
In Creative Administration Research’s first phase, the National Center for Choreography team invited most of the choreographers. The second round of the program will feature open application periods, the first beginning Sept. 5. In addition to creating thought partner-choreographer teams, the 2.0 edition will also “seed administrative experiments,” Bolingbroke said, allowing artists to propose specific short-term projects — renting a dedicated operational space, making a temporary administrative hire — which the program will both fund and facilitate. Between large national summits in Akron, the program will host smaller gatherings of artists and administrators in other cities around the country. And a book of essays on the program’s findings is in the works.
Bolingbroke hopes these expanded efforts will help spread the gospel of creative administration not just outward, but also upward to larger arts institutions. There is only so much individual artists can do to fix administrative problems that are often systemic, especially in the wake of pandemic shutdowns.
“We’re in a scary place right now, with a lot of arts organizations cutting back or closing,” Bolingbroke said. “I think as a whole field, we’re going to have to reimagine our way forward together.”
Dance residency centers have not fared well in the post-shutdown reckoning. In January the American Dance Institute announced it was selling its Lumberyard campus, formerly an important dance incubator; in June the choreographer Stephen Petronio decided to shutter his residency center, which had been a haven for dance artists. The center in Akron has survived partly by applying the creative administration principles championed by its own programming.
During its eight years of existence, the center has tested out and rethought several administrative positions, seeking the right balance of stability and flexibility. (For a while, Bolingbroke was its only full-time employee.) That adaptive approach has helped the center weather an uncertain climate. In the past year, it has not contracted but expanded, adding more staff and programming.
As a young organization, “we don’t have too many ‘We’ve always done it that way’ habits that we have to let go of,” Bolingbroke said. “We’re evolving alongside our artists.”
Few choreographers emerge from the program with solutions to every administrative problem. But those problems feel less daunting, Moore-Dunson said, now that he thinks of administration as part of his art.
Before Creative Administration Research, “there was admin over here and artistry over there, and I tried to spend as much of my time as possible on the artistic side,” Moore-Dunson said. “Now I’ve started to see them as one and the same. Spreadsheets? That’s just the choreography of numbers. They tell a story, the same way the dance I’m going to rehearse later tells a story.”
Waterfall and woodpecker among Low Barns photo display
John WearmouthStoats, waterfalls and a woodpecker are among the subjects of a photography club’s new exhibition.
Members of the Low Barns Photography Group will display their best shots at Low Barns Nature Reserve near Bishop Auckland over the bank holiday weekend.
The club shared some of its most eye-catching pictures with the BBC ahead of the exhibition.
The free display will be at the Durham Wildlife Trust-run site near Witton-le-Wear from 26 to 30 August.
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What’s a food stylist and why you need one for food photography
Picture this: you’re working on a photo shoot for Ben & Jerry’s, but the Chunky Monkey is starting to melt, and you haven’t even begun photographing it. Much like any other model, food often needs special attention in order to look its best. That’s where a food stylist comes in.
Table of contents
Food stylists possess the experience and expertise required to make food look delicious. Given this core responsibility, a food stylist will usually possess a background in the culinary arts, through either professional qualifications or self-education.
Depending on the scope of the project, the stylist may control anything from selecting ingredients to plating and styling the dish. Stylists ensure the food looks camera-ready for each click of the shutter.
What are the Responsibilities of a Food Stylist?
When choosing a professional food stylist, it’s helpful to be aware of the difference between a stylist who specializes in editorial vs. advertising work. An advertising food stylist is primarily concerned with styling food with the intention of selling the products to a consumer. This is in contrast to the editorial food stylist, who uses food and props to tell a story.
In addition to styling, some also focus on recipe development and cooking, making them specialists in a specific category. With a large amount of knowledge surrounding a specific food item, some food stylists make their own recipe stand-ins. Ice cream, for instance, is one of the hardest foods to style due to its rapid melting point and consistency, and only the most expert hands know how to shape it appropriately and maintain it for the shoot.
Stylists are usually supplied with a surplus of ingredients, and tasked with creating a picture-perfect spread. In order to make the food appear that way, food stylists employ a whole host of tricks to deceive the senses.
Food Styling Tricks
- Reinforce ingredients with paints and dips for a more vibrant look.
- Drop vegetables in water or vinegar
- Paint ingredients with a glaze to provide a glossy look
- Employ props and materials to preserve a food’s form and structure. For example,
- Toothpicks to hold stacks of fruits together
- Tweezers to rearrange sesame seeds on a hamburger bun
- Wax to keep ingredients stuck to one another
- Utilize look-alike substitutes to maintain a fresh look more consistently for longer stretches of time. For example,
- Mashed potatoes and lard for ice cream
- Painted grill lines on a rare steak
- Elmer’s glue and water to recreate milk for splashy photo shoots
- Fake ice cubes that are unaffected by room temperature
- Dried glue to resemble crumbles
- Bubbles to make drinks look fizzy or frothy
While these tricks remain useful, the industry has been moving towards more authentic imagery, resulting in stylists using more “real” ingredients and emphasizing imperfections. Generally, the tricks are more commonly deployed in advertising photography, whereas editorial photography tends to stay true to the ingredients as they are. However, the bottom line is that the “tricks” are being deployed less often nowadays.
Working with a Food Stylist
The Project Pitch
Having a food stylist’s name attached to a project pitch or treatment can impress potential clients that much more. A food stylist’s portfolio and client list function as additional selling points, and they could be the difference in a highly competitive bidding process.
Most global brands maintain a roster of vetted food stylists, individuals that they’d work with again and again in a heartbeat. These stylists are intimately familiar with a brand’s guidelines, recognizing the do’s and don’ts through experience. They are undoubted assets to a photographer, as they understand a brand’s aesthetic better than most.
For photographers who are embarking on a project with a large brand, it can be beneficial to inquire if the brand has a preferred stylist, or if the brand would like to see stylist recommendations. This can be brought up during the initial creative call. Working with a brand’s go-to stylist streamlines the creative process, and the end result has a greater chance of being aligned with client expectations. Quite simply, these food stylists are a form of insider knowledge, eliminating the need for trial and error on photo shoots.
Food Styling Workflow
A food stylist’s level of involvement on a photo shoot is determined by the size of the project. Nashville-based stylist Whitney Kemp broke down the many paths she might take on an assignment.
The size of the job greatly influences how decisions and workflow are decided on each job. On a very large job, I often interact very little with the actual client, but rather get information through the producers and product development (PD) person for the client. Whereas on a smaller job, I might even text the client directly regarding specific details prior to and during the job. Another element that decides the workflow would be determined by who hires me. At times I am hired by the agency, other times by the photographer, and other times I’m hired directly by the client. Depending on who actually hires me, I defer to their preferences.
However, Whitney provided a rough outline of her usual workflow on a food photo shoot.
- Receive the recipes and shot list, then review them for any questions.
- Have a pre-production call with the photographer/agency/producer/director and all other departments to get a plan in place and have any questions answered.
- Make prep lists and grocery lists.
- Work closely with the product development person for the client during prep day and make sure the food is prepared as required by the recipe.
- On shooting days:
- Work with her team to split time and responsibilities between the kitchen and on-set, ensuring everything is ready as scheduled.
- Involve the PD person as much as possible to make sure the food taken to set is correct. This is crucial to staying on schedule and avoiding errors that cost time and money.
New Orleans-based food stylist Martha Torres dove a little deeper into the topic of ingredient purchases for different types of productions.
If it’s a recipe-based project, we’d ideally get recipes in advance to see what’s realistically needed for creating the “hero” for the camera in the required quantity. If it’s a food manufacturer’s product, they will ship the ingredients to the studio or the prep kitchen location in advance, with input from the food stylist on the quantity. Purchasing can be done through Instacart or online ordering for basic ingredients and expendables. For more important ingredients, that’s either myself or an experienced assistant doing the shopping.
Personally, I love to shop as you sometimes find something at the grocery or farmers market that is unique or early in season that can unexpectedly work for plating or background. Serendipity happens…. like coming across a vendor at the farmers market who has beyond wonderful old-style wooden flats of blueberries or strawberries, which you can use for ingredients, food props, background, AND set design.
For last-minute on-set glitches, a production assistant in the food styling department would handle the purchases.
Skillset and Specialization
Choosing the right stylists for the shoot can be tricky, so to give us some insight, Cincinnati-based photographer Teri Campbell shared how he makes his selections.
Sometimes the choice is more about what the stylist excels at, or specializes in. Or maybe the project is more about the art and less about the science. When we are shooting images that will be used on packaging, we need to be very precise with the measurements and details. However, if we’re shooting a sandwich for Ziploc, it’s more important that the sandwich looks beautiful.
Teamwork and Collaboration
Teamwork is essential to the success of the shoot, which is why Teri suggests testing out a food stylist before booking them. This will help you identify the stylist’s strengths and weaknesses while evaluating the chemistry on set.
At the same time, getting inside the food stylist’s head can be useful in figuring out the best strategy for collaboration. We asked stylist Barrett Washburne to share a few of his personal guidelines.
The first thing is to be prepared. Make sure you’ve gone through each recipe/shot and purchased or brought everything you could possibly need. It’s also important to anticipate the needs of a client – there are so many things they could ask for on a shoot. Thinking ahead will save you a lot of time (and assistant trips to the store).
Secondly, stay calm and adapt effortlessly to any situation. You may have spent 30 minutes arranging a plate, but once it’s on set, it may not work for the shot. Swallow your pride and do it again (even if it was perfect the first time). No one likes a diva on set, and being difficult won’t get you hired again. Have confidence in your abilities and share your opinion, but know when to lay off. Remember that this is a team sport!
I ALWAYS work with an assistant…a good assistant is a necessity! They can be readying the parts of the next dish while you are on set, making sure everything looks perfect. A great assistant knows how you like things done and exactly what point to take things to…so all I have to do is put it all together. THANKFULLY they also do all my dishes!
Food Stylist vs Prop Stylist
Besides having an assistant on hand, food stylists work with prop stylists as well. Prop stylists are responsible for choosing items such as plates, bowls, utensils, and other props needed for a food shoot. Barrett expanded on the importance of this counterpart.
Most of the time, I have a prop stylist on set. Usually, we all go over the recipes the morning of the shoot and pick out what will work best for each shot — I always say it’s a team sport! Occasionally we will shoot in a studio that is also a prop house, and I will select props with the photographer (if there isn’t much budget). I much prefer when there is a prop stylist on set, though, because it makes everything a lot easier — they are so talented in what they do. It’s just as valuable to have a good prop stylist as it is to have a good photographer and food stylist!
The budget ultimately determines the presence of a prop stylist, and as Whitney highlighted, this distinguishes commercial assignments from editorial ones.
On most commercial jobs, there is a separation between props and food styling. I see props as everything on the set except the actual food being featured by the client. The prop stylist is to provide me with clean plates that are camera ready to put food on. On a very large job, they would also be responsible for taking those plates and cleaning them, after I have removed the food. As for “prop food,” such as background bowls and baskets of fruit, props is actually responsible for those, but I am responsible for fresh cues to accent the dishes we are featuring, such as some berries surrounding a drink, or some spices/herbs to show the consumer what is in the dish. On smaller editorial jobs, I often handle tabletop props and food styling, usually with an assistant or two.
Martha frequently works in the video space on commercials and features. She described how a food stylist’s working conditions are different on motion projects compared to photo shoots.
Doing film work is way different than print. Food styling in film works under the Property Master, who has others in their department or in the overall Art Department resourcing props. The Property Master is part of the Art Department, under the purview of the Art Director on a film crew. Food stylists don’t deal with most props, with the exception of getting “food props” for on-set visuals.
Food styling works closely with the Prop Master in advance to determine needs, e.g. 10 Pantone 279 or similar 6.5” diameter plates for Scene 4. If food styling is taking care of both the “hero” & BG (background) food, we will have production assistants dedicated to running BG items from the kitchen/rig to the set and back. Everyone is on walkies and in communication in some way. Logistically, film is very different than a photo shoot.
For either print or film, if there’s a “chef” (real or actor) on camera, food styling will most often resource the set design props for the “chef.” Food styling has more expertise, e.g. knowing which type of whisk would be needed.
Cost of a Food Stylist
You’re probably wondering how much it would cost to hire a food stylist for your next photo shoot. For non-metro areas, food stylists charge an average of $600-$900 a day, and for big metro areas like New York, food stylists can command $1,000-$1,500/day. If a food stylist is represented by an agency, you can add an additional 20% of their day rate as an agent commission.
As most things go, a food stylist’s pay on advertising jobs will be much more than those in the editorial space. Bigger sets that involve more work demand higher rates of pay.
Ignore Food Stylists at Your Own Peril
Food styling is a combination of art and science that goes beyond the mere preparation and presentation of food. While the scope of a stylist’s role can vary depending on the project, their knowledge and bag of tricks are indispensable to the success of a photo shoot. Do away with them, and your melted cheese on a pizza may look like white viscous tendrils, while your salad that needed some dressing may appear as if it’s doused in gasoline. Neither scenario is appealing in any way, and the one person who could prevent it would be the food stylist.
About the Authors
Bryan Sheffield is a photographer born and raised in NYC, but has lived in in four other states. He received a BFA in photography from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Throughout Bryan’s career his love for creative planning of detailed productions has led him to concept, plan, and execute photography and productions for publications, brands, and agencies all over the world. You’ll find more of his work on his website and connect with him through LinkedIn.
Sankha Wanigasekara graduated from Drexel University with a degree in Entertainment & Arts Management. Since 2017, he’s worked at Wonderful Machine as both researcher and publicist, currently writing and editing a variety of articles in the publicity department. You can find more of his work on Medium and connect with him through LinkedIn. This article was originally published here and shared with permission.
