Food Photography
Food
Food photography as a form of listening. Not making food look appetizing, but understanding what a dish is trying to say and finding a way to hold that in a single frame.
The first thing I do when I start working with a chef is ask questions. The most important thing at the beginning, I think, is to get familiar with the place and the people who work there. What I'm most interested in understanding is the idea behind the culinary offer being made. What the chef is trying to say. From that point on, the work is figuring out how to translate that idea with a camera.
The method
Starting from the dish, not the aesthetic
Photographing food in a way that holds your attention requires, above all else, understanding what you're photographing. This sounds obvious, but it's not how most commercial food work operates — where a visual style gets applied to any subject regardless of what it is. What I do instead is start with what a chef actually wants to say: the technique behind the dish, the relationship with ingredients, the season it carries, the memory embedded in it. The photograph comes after, as an attempt to hold all of this without flattening it.
In practice this means spending time in the kitchen before shooting, understanding the rhythm of service, watching the processes unfold. The best images aren't constructed — they're found in the moment when you know enough about a place to recognize them.
Projects and collaborations
The kitchens I work with
Over time, this way of working has taken me inside some of the most precise kitchens in Italy — where I've come to know both established icons and exciting new talents. I've photographed Niko Romito, Heinz Beck, and Tommaso Tonioni at ARSO, with whom I've built a visual language that's been growing for years — grounded in raw matter, waiting, a rigor that comes from the territory. Every kitchen speaks differently, and applying the same formula to all of them would make my work pointless — or, the way I see it, imprecise: if I represented all food the same way, it would look as though the same person was always cooking it.
I also work with Domenico Marotta, Giulio Gigli at UNE, and other smaller operations looking for this same approach to their communication. Each collaboration has followed its own visual logic, built from the culinary project outward rather than imposed from the outside.
Output
What the work produces
The work I produce covers the full range of a restaurant's visual communication: images for menus and websites, photographs for social media, material for editorial and print. I've published in Cook_inc., Gambero Rosso, Puntarella Rossa, Food&Wine Italia, Bromio, and others. I've worked on advertising campaigns as well as process documentation. The distinction between editorial and commercial work matters, and I try to keep it clear in every project.
For the restaurants I work with on an ongoing basis, the most important result isn't any single image but the accumulated coherence — a visual corpus that grows over time and becomes recognizable as something specific about that place.
If you have a culinary project with an identity you want to communicate and want to understand whether it makes sense to work together, get in touch. I'd be happy to talk it through, offer some thoughts, and see whether there's a basis for a collaboration.
Get in touch