ThePictureKitchen – Marie-Louise Avery
UK
Marie-Louise Avery is a professional photographer, who, building on a background as an art director in book and magazine publishing turned to photography 20 years ago. She quickly specialised in food photography combining a lifelong love of food with a an almost obsessive interest in the captured image. Her work has appeared in countless magazines and books, as images for packaging for the big supermarkets like Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer, and as advertising for big food names like McDonald’s.
This collection includes many personal and portfolio images that stand in their own right as artworks.
“When I tell people that I am a food photographer and that I shoot food for magazines, or books or food packaging and those large posters in supermarkets, the first question is usually about what we do to the food to make it look so good. Everyone seems to have heard stories about awful materials painted on, or strange substitutes for the real thing.
In my twenty years as a food photographer I have always aimed to avoid the tricks and photograph food as simply as possible, the food is what it is – real. All the photographs supplied to EUFD were shot using daylight as the light source but to make the most of the texture, colour and shape of food using natural light presents at least as much of a challenge as using a complicated flash lighting set up. I work with talented food stylists to arrange things beautifully on a plate and take great care with props and composition, but the real skill for me in food photography is finding a way using light, focus and composition to convey to the viewer the same excitement that I feel when I first look at my subject and want to eat it!
These pictures show some of the solutions to that problem.”