Every cheese has its own white
A Sicilian dairy in Calatafimi Segesta. In 2021 we photographed their cheeses for the website and the catalogue: ricotta, primo sale, primo sale with olives, chilli and rocket, caciotta, aged pecorino and peppered pecorino.
- Project
- Spatafora Formaggi
- Sector
- Dairy
- Year
- 2021
- Services
- Styled food & recipes · Advertising & catalogues
The brief
Five photographs, one commission with two destinations: the website and the catalogue. They had to stand on their own, one at a time, and together, side by side, as a series that came from the same eye. The style was settled straight away: clean, neutral colours, nothing to distract from the cheeses. And five images is not many, so each one had to be enough on its own to present its cheese.
The constraint
A neutral style takes away the photographer's easiest help, colour contrast: no dark backgrounds, no bright tablecloths, no objects acting as a frame. What is left is the pale wall, the wood and the cheeses, most of which sit within the same range of whites. That is exactly where the picture is made, because every cheese has its own: the full white of the ricotta, the ivory of the primo sale, the straw of the caciotta, the pale paste of the pecorino inside its brown rind. The eye reads those differences at once, and a photograph flattens them as soon as the light is wrong. On top of that, the surface of a cheese is all pattern — the ridges of the rind, the grain of the ricotta, the small eyes of the cut — and if the white burns out it all goes at once, leaving a pale shape on a pale ground.
How we solved it
One light, from the left, the same for the whole series. It is side-on enough to lift the ridges of the rind and the grain of the ricotta, but soft, so the whites stay full without burning out. The wall does the rest: it is not a flat backdrop but a rough one, and the light crossing it drops a tone from left to right, exactly where the cheeses sit. So the brightest white in the frame stands out against a slightly darker ground instead of disappearing into it. Around it, only materials with a texture and no colour: worn wood, woven baskets, a cloth. The baskets repeat the ridged pattern of the rind, and in two shots the blue-grey cloth cools the wood just slightly. The only colour in the series comes from the cheeses themselves: the olives, chilli and rocket beside the primo sale are what it has inside. Next to each whole form there is always a cut wedge — except the ricotta, which stays whole — so that one photograph shows both rind and paste: what you recognise on the shelf and what you find on the table.
What we delivered
- Five styled photographs, from the ricotta to the aged pecorino
- Same set and same light for the whole series, so the images sit well side by side
- The whole form beside the cut, to show rind and paste in the same image
- Files for the website and files for the printed catalogue
Where the images ended up
- Website
- Product catalogue
