Feast Your Eyes

I MAKE ART WITH FOOD.

I was raised in San Diego by my grandparents, a couple of Cajuns for whom food was everything. They introduced me to their Southern roots with the flavors of okra, gumbo, and grits—all of which seemed exotic to my elementary school classmates. I wondered: if the foods I ate every day were a revelation to my friends, what other new things could I show the world?

My grandma wasn’t a professional photographer, but she showed me how special it was to pause and save memories—like we did on a monthlong road trip down Baja California when I was five, living the dream of eating tacos for every meal. When I was given my own camera at age eleven, photography became my life. I began to think creatively, to see the world through a frame that was as mobile as my camera viewfinder. Taking the time to watch how light reflects through glass, or to find the patterns in shadows, awoke a passion for using only natural light in my images.

I took these experiences straight to corporate America, where a day job repairing computers started to eat all my creative energy and left me feeling depleted. The days began to feel like a colorless blur: go to work, come home, sleep, wake up, repeat. I needed something to get excited about again. I considered going to rally-car school and living out my racing dreams but eventually chose a more practical (and less dangerous) option. I decided to teach myself how to cook.

Like any beginner, I jumped from recipe to recipe, collecting techniques from a stack of cookbooks. As I became more experienced, I found myself getting more inspired by the beauty of the ingredients than by the final dish I put on the table. I started shopping at farmers’ markets and getting to know the people who grew my food. Along the way, I saw things like the delicious variety of colors that carrots can be—and realized I could connect my love for light and color with food.

I began a new project in which, unlike food blogs that showcase the end result of a recipe, I would photograph the ingredients at the beginning: as mise en place, how they looked before step one in the recipe. My eyes were drawn to how the naturally occurring shapes fit together, along with the patterns they were capable of making. When I created my first image with a gradient of color flowing across my ingredients, I felt like I had opened a treasure chest.

Without knowing it, I was creating the concept behind this book: using photography to tell a story about our food that changes the way we see it. I hope these images get you to slow down, take a breath, and marvel at the gorgeous abundance we can create from the earth.

In this book, you will find what I love about the magic of food. These images showcase not only the brilliant colors of our produce but also their varied textures and sizes, and how they change throughout their growth.

My goal for the future is to help communities appreciate the beauty of the ingredients we see every day. That beauty is the final product of a lot of hard work, and connecting with our food and those who grow and cook it is meaningful. As more and more people have found my #foodgradients on Instagram, I’ve had the opportunity to meet and learn from chefs, food producers, and farmers around the country. Their passion inspires my work.

The ingredients for each image were sourced at local farms, farm stands, and grocery stores, and styled in my studio. (I have definitely been known to bring out a cashier’s knowledge of produce SKUs as a party trick! And I’ll take any excuse to buy more than a hundred doughnuts at a time.)

Creating art is my way of using the power of food and art to bring people together, to calm, and to comfort. I hope these images bring a smile to your face and inspire you to bring some of these foods home and create a meal. I have given my imagination a home in these pages, and I hope you have as much fun inside this book as I did creating it for you.