I’ve understood for a long time that my strongest images are usually made while documenting subjects that interest me. That’s why I headed downtown last week to document what I feel is the most compelling time of the day: lunch.
Nothing too tricky about these photos, just people accosted in public by a stranger with a camera while eating their midday meal. As you can tell, some were only too happy to share in their moment of respite, others not so much. I’d put my success rate (success being defined as allowing me to photograph them) at right around 50%, which I feel is a fairly good representation of the state of Minnesota Nice in the Minneapolis area these days.
Sometimes the search for good times and original images leads you to some unexpected places. Last Sunday, the search took me and a hearty band of food lovers to an interstate rest stop one hour northwest of Minneapolis. Why? Well, have you ever seen photos of gourmet food mere yards from an interstate? I hadn’t either, so I thought I’d fill that gaping void.
None of this would have happened if not for the involvement of Asher Miller, Executive Chef, Wolfgang Puck’s 20.21 Restaurant. The challenge I posed to Asher was to come up with twists on traditional road trip dishes and prepare them on the road – practically on the roadway itself, as it turned out. To my continued amazement, he accepted the challenge, and invited some friends and family along for the ride. So what did he come up with?
Watermelon cubes with feta crumbles & balsamic
Deviled eggs
Local cheese plate, featuring blueberry & raspberry cheddars and aged gouda
Tuna carpaccio atop crostini with citrus greens
Mini burgers on homemade buns
Grilled quail
Potato salad
Assorted Surly beers
The food was incredible, the weather perfect. Judging by the smiles in the photos, I think the lesson is that a well-crafted piece of food can drown out quite a bit of road noise.
One more thanks to pass on, and that goes to Rachel Sherwood, food stylist extraordinaire, for her invaluable help wrangling props and making Asher’s delicious food look its best.
I’ll be posting my first behind the scenes video from the shoot in the days (weeks?) to come, so stay tuned!
A few months back I shot a story for Food Management Magazine profiling Jean Ronnei, the Director of Nutrition and Commercial Services for St. Paul Public Schools. I met Jean at one of the public schools some portraits, then I stuck around to photograph a {gulp} lunch hour. Yes, it was a melee.
When I think of school lunches I remember back to some pretty bland, mediocre stuff: the most basic of dishes, with the bare minimum of fruits and vegetables. So I was surprised and heartened to learn more about what Jean’s got going in St. Paul.
Menus have expanded to offer dishes representative of St. Paul’s diverse population. Efforts are made to source ingredients locally. Student helpers scrape food waste into compost bins prior to sending the trays to the dishwasher. As I don’t have kids myself I’m not really up on the state of school food programs in general, but what they’ve done in St. Paul gives me hope.
When I first met Stefan Meyer it was late Spring and he was a few weeks away from kicking off the inaugural season of Growing Lots, a pretty unique urban farm located in my South Minneapolis neighborhood. Back then, Stefan told me the general premise of the farm – take an abandoned and unwanted parking lot in an industrial part of town and turn it in to a farm selling produce to local markets and restaurants, and CSA shares to neighborhood residents – and I knew I needed to photograph his progress. As often happens to start up businesses, Growing Lots has worked through some tweaks to their original idea in order to get the process rolling, but the result is a place that’s even more interesting that I had expected it to be, which is a testament to Stefan’s creativity and dedication to the concepts of urban farming.
I’d definitely recommend checking out the Growing Lots Blog for all the details about what Stefan is up to. It’s inspiring. The general gist goes like this: you hear ‘farm’ and ‘abandoned parking lot’ and you assume that the black top has been ripped out, right? Nope. Stefan is creating beds right over the top. The original concept of covering the whole plot with soil in one swoop didn’t work out, so he’s been going little by little, adding on to the main bed as he’s ready to plant more seedlings. He’s also experimenting with these ingenious planters (made of tomato cages, straw, and soil clocking in at about $1.75 each to construct) that hold an incredible number of plants for such a small footprint.
Mostly by chance, I stopped by on the morning of the farm’s first CSA share pick up day. Here’s Stefan harvesting some kale for one of the CSA boxes.
Hopefully I’ll have a chance to stop by in a month to check the farm’s progress. As the early season greens are harvested, late season things like brassicas and melons are just sprouting up, and I’m excited to see what the farm will look like as Stefan finds more ways to innovate and pull food from the urban landscape.
It’s been a little while since I’ve done any work on my snack series, so I was pretty excited when Stef emailed me a couple days after we met at a mutual friend’s birthday party a couple weeks ago.
From what I can gather, Stef eats a lot of cereal: for breakfast, as a comfort food after any kind of trip, and as a late night snack. Usually the snack is a mix of little bits of all the cereal varieties she has in the cupboard (five on my visit) in a glass or ramekin.
Something that I’ve noticed on these shoots is the beautiful release of tension that people get when they start eating a familiar, delicious piece of food. People can be a little apprehensive about having their picture taken, and then, once the first bite of snack hits the tongue, bam. A sigh, a low hum of contentment, a smile. Aaaaahhh.
