The harvest does not wait
A Sicilian mill and olive grove, since 1925. In 2021 we followed the picking in the grove and the work inside the mill.
- Project
- Olio Geraci
- Year
- 2021
The brief
Images for the website, for social and for advertising. Not a product shoot: an account of how the oil is actually made. It is the material an extra virgin producer needs to be able to show — to an importer, to a buyer, to anyone who reads the label and wonders why it costs what it costs — and it is the material almost no mill has.
The constraint
A reportage like this has two halves that look nothing alike. Outside, among the trees, the light is whatever it is: high, very hard sun, backlight through the leaves, shadows that cut. Inside, a working hall of mixed light, stainless steel, white coats and machines in motion. The two halves have to come from the same hand and read as one story, and there is no pause in between to reset everything. On top of that, nothing that happens can be run again: the picking keeps its own pace, so does the plant, and asking someone to repeat a movement means stopping a working line. You photograph what happens, when it happens.
How we solved it
The order of the day is agreed beforehand with the person running it and the positions are chosen in advance, in the grove and inside: so that once it starts, nobody is asked for anything. Outside, the hard light is not fought but used — backlight through the leaves, the clean shadow on the net, and the hands, which tell you more about hand-picking than any caption could. Inside, light kit to move through a working space without getting in the way, and a colour reference taken on the spot: in a hall of mixed light the greens are the first thing to go false, and keeping them right is half the job. The two halves are then graded by the same hand — same rendering of the greens, same treatment of the whites — so grove and mill read as one story. And the sequence closes where it really closes: at the table, with bread.
What we delivered
- Reportage of the picking in the grove and the work inside the mill
- The stages of the process: delivery, washing, malaxing
- Portraits at work, with no posing
- Tasting and table images, for the institutional pages and for social
- Files sized for the website, social and advertising
Where the images ended up
- Website
- Social
- Advertising
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Nothing is moved and nothing is asked for in the grove: the work keeps its own pace and the frame is found inside it, not around it.
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A hall of mixed light throws the greens off before anything else. The colour reference is taken on site and the file is checked against what was actually there.
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