Photography for dairies and cheesemakers

White is not one colour

The full white of a ricotta, the ivory of a fresh cheese, the straw of an aged paste: they are different colours, and buyers read them as data. They also depend on the milk — cows carry the carotenoids of their feed into the milk, which turn the paste yellow, while sheep and goats convert them into vitamin A, which has no colour, and give whiter cheeses. A photograph that shifts that colour by half a tone tells the story of a different product. It is held with a colour reference on set and an exposure that keeps the whites full without burning them: a burnt-out white has no grain and no shape left, it becomes a silhouette.

The rind is the pattern of the form

The ridges of a canestrato are the grooves left by the rushes of the basket it took shape in; other rinds carry the weave of the mould or the marks of ageing. It is the part of the cheese people recognise on the shelf, and it is also what frontal light wipes out: lit from the front, an aged wheel becomes a brown cylinder. It needs side light, low enough to raise the relief, and a background that is not the same tone as the rind.

The cut shows the paste

Once opened, a cheese shows what it is: a compact or crumbly paste, small eyes or large ones, peppercorns, olives, pistachio, chilli. The cut decides what can be seen, and it is chosen before the photograph: a wedge opened a centimetre further along may not show a single olive. That is why the cheese is cut on set, in front of the camera, and cut more than once. A freshly opened surface is the right one, and it does not stay right for long.

Under the lights, cheese sweats

As soon as it warms up, a cheese starts to bead: it is the fat rising to the surface. A fresh cheese just out of its pack gathers moisture, a ricotta keeps losing whey, an aged paste dries and cracks along the edge of the cut. None of this is fixed well afterwards on screen. It is fixed beforehand: the set ready and the light already metered when the cheese comes out of the fridge, and several pieces at hand to swap the one that has stopped looking its best.

The dairy, when milk becomes cheese

The vat, the curd being broken, the hands filling the moulds, the ricotta rising from the hot whey and lifted out with a skimmer. No customer ever walks into a dairy, and hardly any dairy has up-to-date images of what happens inside: it is the material the institutional pages need, and the importer's presentation, and the supply-chain story. It is photographed as it happens, within the rhythm of production and in line with hygiene protocols. And the move between the steam of the make room and the cold of the ageing rooms is planned for, because it fogs the lens exactly when you need it.