Comrades welcome to Shake & Bake, this new section in the newsletter where I share stories from my life and work as a professional food photographer.
If you remember, last month I was looking for suggestions to name this section and I had an extremely entertaining session with GPT asking for such suggestions, I don’t think it hit the nail with “Astral Appetites, or Quantum Quiches”, this is not exactly how I’d describe my work although, my relationship with food can be quite mystical. So, I settled for “Shake & Bake” because the expression resonates with my philosophy of simplicity in taste and efficiency in my work; plus, it’s short and catchy.
Also last month I had a brief message exchange here on Substack with fellow photographer
about telling our story and how we got to where we are with our work so today I’m sharing my journey with you from a gastronomic and photographic point of view:For all that I remember, food, art and photography have been the only constant in my life; my earliest memories are those of me sitting in my grandma’s kitchen while the smell of roasting chilies, onions, and tomatoes filled the air or checking out my grandparent’s collection of LIFE magazines, helping my dad on Sundays peeling prawns for the paella or keeping myself entertained with a camera taking pictures as an only child.
As a kid I was an adventurous eater, thanks to my mom’s job in a Dutch airline and my dad’s business distributing medical equipment from Europe I had a very different upbringing traveling constantly with them, attending meetings, conferences, and congresses. My therapist agrees that my childhood was everything but normal, I grew up surrounded mostly by adults, doing adult things and rarely surrounded by children, only at school though, but I found them boring; and of course, there was always food involved; because of this, exotic delicacies and the occasional visit to a fine dining restaurant became a normal thing. But my excitement for food comes from sharing the table with family and friends and learning about recipes, processes, and the combination of ingredients and flavours.
At the same time, a camera or a photo book were my best companions on these trips and, in most cases, my only form of distraction/entertainment when my parents were busy. I was a quiet, well-behaved kid who loved to immerse in his own world. I’ve always enjoyed taking pictures and I’ve always been a natural observer, I have a photographic memory and a wandering imagination, my mind works in images, and scenes; I’m not good with words or numbers, I can’t remember names, can’t follow recipes or instructions, I’m dyslexic, perhaps ADHD, most likely hypersensitive, all this allows me to see the world in a particular way that’s why I’m good at observing, having an eye for details and for telling stories, nothing else.
By now you can start getting the picture of why I naturally gravitated towards food photography as a career option.
In my teens, I was the guy who was always cooking for my starving friends, for the guys in the band, for girlfriends to try to impress them, I didn’t need recipe books, somehow I knew what worked as I could visualize flavours. Also then, I decided that I wanted to study art and make a career as an artist or in any creative field but society in the mid-90s in Mexico was still a little bit old-fashioned and judgemental; if you didn’t follow the path of school-high school-university-corporate job, then your chances to succeed professionally and in Mexican society in particular were minimal. The entrepreneurial culture that we see today was non-existent then, and of course I had a lot of pressure from those around me to follow that path.
So I made a deal with my mom: Learn a profession, in the food industry since I loved food so much and then I’d be able to do whatever else I wanted to.
Now, I’m skipping the details of my years in Uni because they were uneventful and I loathed the experience and everyone in it. You know how they say that Uni years are your best and where you meet your friends for life? Well, not for me, I couldn’t wait to get out of there, and except for my 3 true friends there, I wanted to forget about everyone in the building, from teachers to students, I hated the experience!
The positives that I embraced from those years are the knowledge, the thought processes, and the philosophy behind cooking and gastronomy that education provided, which distilled into a deep knowledge and understanding of food culture. I had 3 teachers who were great at discussing ideas, to them, I’m forever grateful!
What followed was a decade or so in hospitality, working in all sorts of establishments from starred restaurants in the Mediterranean to an exclusive Jewish country club in NY to a pizza shop in a bus stop in the UK. I traveled, I learned a lot more about food culture and I won’t lie to you, it is a beautiful experience to be working with food but it also can be a very demanding, unforgiving, and highly unrewarding industry.
To quote one of the biggest assholes I’ve ever crossed paths with, he walked into the classroom on our first day at Uni, stared at us with a condescending look, and out of nowhere said this to a classroom full of young kids hungry to be the next Ferran Adria or Jamie Oliver in the industry:
“To endure and succeed in hospitality, you got to be either mad or stupid”
looked around the room to spot a few reactions and within seconds he walked away without even introducing himself. He set the tone for the years to follow.
In my hallway I have this A1 poster that reads “Don’t work with assholes, don’t work for assholes” That is the first thing I see before stepping out of my comfort zone. To this day, that’s my professional motto.
While working in the food industry, I was never really there, my mind was always absent, daydreaming, and imagining how to tell the stories of the food I was serving, I was fascinated by the characters I met; my mind was busy translating taste into images, I never felt I belonged there, I wasn’t ambitious enough, my passion was in art and storytelling, not on customer satisfaction, still then I a camera was my best companion.
So it’s no surprise that at 30 I burnt out! I had given too much of myself to the industry and got almost nothing in return, I was just getting married, with no money, no time, no energy, no social life, and an extremely unhealthy lifestyle. So I took a sabbatical to sort myself out and try to fix the things that I wasn’t happy with.
Again, photography became a therapeutic escape. My wife saw potential in commercial food photography since I had an eye for the details and the obvious experience, but I wasn’t sure, all I knew was that I wanted to be as far as possible from it. In the end I did a few favours here and there, a friend helped with an intro to a very good restaurant and that was it. I knew the industry, I knew food culture, I knew my way around a camera, the rest I’ve been learning as I grow. and most importantly, as I share my experience with emerging photographers.
During my time in hospitality, I learned some skills that help me today run my own business, the most important being attitude and discipline, I learned these through blood and tears; I also learned about the potential of ideas and creative thinking, the importance of working on building your creative process. To have critical and analytical thinking to tackle problems, and to constantly strive for excellence in what you do; These are the principles of my business together with the no-assholes rule!
But most importantly, I learned that food is related to absolutely everything in our world! from politics, economics, and anthropology to art and entertainment. To me being able to work as a food photographer means studying, and understanding the world we live in through taste and its authors.
Thanks for reading!
On September the 7th I’ll be giving a 6-week Masterclass on Food Photography via Zona Zero in Mexico City. The leading platform in Latin America for education for photographers. The workshop is in Spanish and will be broadcasted live Via Zoom. If you’re interested, please contact me so I can help you sign up.
I like it, Xavi, sharing your story. It's great to know about your background. Makes you related even more to the images and words you present here.
A very interesting read. I love your way with words and would never have thought you have had struggles with them. I also love your No Assholes rule. Def words to live by.