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Fifteen years ago last month in 2003 I started travelling across northern Europe, from Denmark through Sweden to Russia, for my second book #thehandmadeloaf which was, in my heart, about cold-weather baking (and had in my head back then a companion follow-on book, “Bread of the Sun” which would have covered Spain, North Africa, The Gulf through to Turkey). So many new experiences for me: baking with freshly milled flour at the home (and mill) of #CamillaPlum, then swimming with her children in the warm winter sea at the top of Denmark.
Learning to make knäckebröd in Sweden. Baking rye bread and drinking late until the night in the countryside outside Moscow. Working with bakers in the most difficult challenging situations, but always with good spirit and a little puzzlement that this English Australian was interested in their bread and baking.
The photography was done while travelling, with a rolled up sheet of white cartridge paper in a tube in my rucksack together with a small parabolic flash head, a tripod, #canonae1 camera, #35mm print film, and not much more than underpants and a toothbrush. I wanted the pictures to be as honest as possible as I baked in different kitchens, so the plain bleak look was part of the plan: I shot the pictures on print film and ran them through a corner shop photolab.
So the plan was that all the food photographs look pretty much like medical examination shots, and cutting the bread open to show the crumb was in part a continuation of that, a bread autopsy if you like to understand more than the shape of the crust. So photographing all the bread in the same way meant that you can’t see that they were all baked and photographed in different locations – Moscow, Lviv, Paris, Newcastle, Turin, Stockholm – even though they look like they’re baked in the one location. My secret rules that governed the journey.
I kept a store of sourdough starter in one of the old plastic film containers so I could bake wherever I found myself, though I just use whatever flour I found on the travels.
As next year is the 15th anniversary of publication, I’ll post monthly stories focusing on towns, people, bakeries and places.
