Barry speaks beautifully about his food and the thinking behind it. Watching him work is mesmerising. He moves fluidly and quickly, producing sumptuousness in minutes.

On Wednesday, we spent some time together and came up with this:

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Mark Cribbins of Ballyhoura Mountain Mushrooms © 2012 Roger Overall

There was a time when nearly everyone could pluck food directly from nature. For our ancestors, a woodland was a larder. For most of us today, it’s a collection of trees. It’s evidence of the increasingly remote connection between nature and the food we eat.

Not everyone is so ignorant, though. Some Westerners are still able to gather food from the countryside.

Mark Cribbins, who owns Ballyhoura Mountain Mushrooms with his wife Lucy, is such a person. He is also a source of eye-opening anecdotes about fungi.

Want to hear about the connection between Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer and drinking mind-altering urine? Or that the largest living organism ever discovered wasn’t measured in feet or metres, but in MILES?

Yes?

Hit the play button below.

Food from nature © 2012 Roger Overall

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Baker kneading dough © 2012 Roger Overall

Making food requires skill. Watching a butcher make sausages or a baker knead dough is mesmerising – to me, at least. Their hands move faster than it seems possible for their brain to control. And when they are done, they have crafted something that I can’t. They’ve also produced something that I really want.

It’s a shame, then, that proper butchering and baking skills seem to be dying out. A high-end butcher friend of mine laments the demise of his craft. He is keeping the flame burning, but worries about the next generation. He once told me of a prediction made at a meat conference in the US: “Soon the only two cuts of meat available will be steak and mince.”

Partly that’s because it’s what the consumer wants. And what the consumer wants, the consumer gets. They barely know any different, because the number of skilled butchers who can show them different is declining. So they stick to what is familiar. It’s a vicious circle.

Some say it’s too late for the tide to turn. Society has progressed too far down the track away from artisan food production, they counsel.

So we should enjoy watching skilled food producers at work while we still can.

Maybe in doing so we can contribute to the slowing, if perhaps not the halt, of society’s dash towards the embrace of ever more industrialised food production.

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Pig at Crowe’s Farm, Co. Tipperary, Ireland © 2012 Roger Overall

Pat Whelan and TJ Crowe are both meat men. Great people to talk to and learn from. Both trying to make a difference in the meat business.

Last year, Pat asked me to photograph the new James Whelan Butchers’ shop at the Avoca food hall in Monkstown, Co. Dublin. And TJ needed photographs for his new range of extensively farmed pork products.

Quite why, I cannot fathom, but it’s taken months for some of the work to find its way on to the portfolio website. I guess life moves so fast sometimes, we forget to pause and reflect on what we did.

The James Whelan Butcher’s shop work is here: The Butcher; the pictures produced for TJ are here: The Pig Farmers.

James Whelan Butcher’s shop in Monkstown – a shrine to meat © 2012 Roger Overall

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Fish at Douglas Farmers’ Market © Roger Overall 2012

“Look at the fish, Em,” I say.

“Eeeeeeeeow!!!” my daughter replies.

She is far more interested in the stand where she can buy gingerbread men. She wants to know how much the smallest ones cost. The lady on the stand tells her 50 cents. Emily is very disappointed. She only has five euros, not 50. I bend down on a knee and explain that each euro is worth 100 cents. She’s learning about money in primary school right now, but she can’t quite make the leap from classroom into the practical world on her own yet. The news about the euro perks her up. She buys two small gingerbread men.

Next she goes to a cake stand. She asks about buying a box of six fairy cakes, but they cost five euros. She understands that she doesn’t have that left, so she buys a single cake instead and races off to sit down opposite the fish stand to eat it.

Music

As it is St Patrick’s Day, three men are playing music at the market. Emily announcs she is going to do “Irish tap dancing” and demands funds from her pocket money to pay the musicians for a song.

In the past, she has earned buskers money by dancing in front of them. Passersby think she is part of the act.

When she is finished, she tells me that she doesn’t have anymore energy left and follows me to the Ballyhoura Mountain Mushrooms stand. Today, standholder Mark is on his own.

“Look at the mushrooms, Em,” I say.

“Eeeeeeeouw!!!”

We have different tastes, though Mark says few, if any, children like mushrooms. He thinks it may be an in-built thing – a defense mechanism against eating poisonous specimens while unsupervised. Only in adulthood do we warm towards fungi.

I buy Shiitakes and Oyster mushrooms for lunch.

Piglets

The next stand along is also run by a familiar face: Martin of Woodside Farm. I intend to buy only bacon, but Emily quickly adds an order of Honey Sausages.

Martin shows her the piglets born the day before on the small screen on his phone.

“What do you do with them?” she asks.

Martin searches for a way to link the piglets to the sausages we have just bought.

“You KILL them don’t you?” Emily says before he can construct a diplomatic response. It isn’t an accusation, merely a statement of fact.

While I chat to Martin, she runs over to the musicians again. She sings a song about St Patrick to them. They listen politely, but strike up a new tune before she can launch into a second rendition.

Sausage roll

She starts a conversation with a man – Michael, I learn later – who runs an organic barbeque stand. By the time I arrive, she has already ordered a sausage bun. I learn that Michael sources his meat from an organic farmer in Carlow. I would like to chat longer, but Her Highness is eager to eat her bun.

She joins a family at a table. She tells them her name, her age (seven) and that her favourite colour is purple. By the way, her sausage is excellent. She gives me a bit of the bun. Only when I protest do I get a half-finger of sausage too.

“Dad?” she asks, moments after she has finished her share.

“Yes?”

“Can we come again next Saturday?”

“Would you like to?”

“This is the best market ever!”

Emily enjoying a cup cake © 2012 Roger Overall

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That’s in stark contrast to Holland, where you don’t have to wander far to find a genuine baker. I remember half a dozen or so in the village where I grew up.

I’ve come to love bread, (sourdough in particular), so it was a treat to come across a genuine baker’s shop in Twickenham while I was in London for an annual report shoot in January. I bought some bread for friends and had a conversation with the owner, Igor Occhiali.

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That’s what’s happening here. I’m retooling my professional life.

Part of that process is a realignment of my photography. I should point out straightaway that I’m not abandoning documentary work. Far from it. Instead, I’m giving it a clearer direction.

Legacy

It’s probably the time of life that I’ve arrived at (mid-40s), but my thoughts are turning towards the end. I’ve lived half my life, very likely more than that, and I need to knuckle down if I want to leave a lasting mark as a photographer, however small.

Leaving a mark is going to take more than producing pretty photographs. Truly significant photographers influence photography itself. Their impact is felt wider as well. In some way, their work impresses itself on to society as a whole. In most cases, the best we can hope for is that we leave a small nick. Some, the greats, leave honking dents. I’d be happy with the former.

Even achieving a miniscule impact isn’t easy. But if we don’t try, we won’t succeed.

Some people will scoff. They will ask who I am to have such a lofty ambition.

I’d reply with another question. Why not?

As photographers, we should all ask ourselves what we want our legacy to be, and then work towards it. We can choose an invisible legacy and succeed, or a monumental one and fail. I think a life pursing the latter is far more rewarding. Besides, failure isn’t guaranteed. What if … ?

Significance isn’t easy

I’ve come to realize two things through brutal experience and by listening to others, not least the photographers I’ve had conversations with for The Documentary Photographer Podcast.

1. Becoming a significant photographer requires a deep, long-term dedication to a genre and subject of the photographer’s own choosing.

2. Being dependent solely on photography for an income undermines your ability to achieve 1. Business pollutes creative intent.

Du-uh, right?

While they may be obvious, almost to the point of being commandments, few photographers act upon them. Those that do have a chance of achieving significance. Those who don’t, don’t. A very few manage to balance the two: earning a good long-term income by only producing and selling work based exclusively on their own vision and voice. But many never even develop their own vision and voice. That is why so much photography is the same, regardless of who took it.

If I want to achieve significance as a documentary photographer, I need to latch on to a single, overarching story and stick with it for a while. A while being a decade or longer.

The story needs to big enough and diverse enough that it can sustain such a long-term effort. It also has to be something I really care about. Ideally something that resonates or impacts a large group of people.

Food fits that description for me.

So I’ve chosen to tell the story of food. Photography will be part of that. Video and audio too. Writing as well, of course.

Paying the bills

It would be great if I could make a good living telling this story. Maybe I will, but I’m not counting on it. The second commandment applies.

So I’m taking the commercial out of it. If I get paying documentary food assignments, I’ll be as happy as a pig in swill. In fact, I’m in pre-production for one right now. Nevertheless, I’m not insisting that it be my main revenue stream. I’m taking that pressure off my photography.

It does mean that I need to earn money from other sources. Fortunately, my career so far has laid the foundations. I’ve been picking up writing and editing work. The Digital Storyteller is taking off. And I’m doing an increasing amount of video work for clients.

Then there’s food photography as the mainstream understands it: recipe still lifes. I get commissions here and there, and I really enjoy them. My big challenge at the moment is developing my own style. I’m back to square one, feeling my way around what is already being done by others, what is the norm. My mission now is to develop a distinct style of food still life.

Housekeeping

As part this course adjustment, some changes needed to be made to my online presence.

This blog is linked to my portfolio website. That is why The Documentary Photographer Podcast has been moved to a new home. It isn’t part of the story that I’m going to be telling here through my photography.

The podcast is still part of my life, though. Like my photography, it is part of my broader legacy plans.

From now on, you’ll find only food-related stories here. They’ll include the sort of thing I was doing on the short-lived Cork Foodie blog, but in a much more expansive way. We’ll go deeper into the story of food – more global and bigger. I’ll also post some of the better stories from Cork Foodie.

Inevitably, there will be personal stuff here too.

Thank you for bearing with me.

The post A Fresh Start Based on Two Commandments appeared first on Bent Fork.

I’m shaking things up.

Something new will start here soon. A journey. I hope you’ll join me.

In the meantime, you may be here looking for The Documentary Photographer blog. It’s waiting for you at a brand new address here: The Documentary Photographer.

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