Food Eye: Photographer, Michael Harlan Turkell
Michael Harlan Turkell has a unique perspective on kitchens. The once aspiring chef has spent time in some of the nation’s best restaurant kitchens, wielding not a Kikuichi knife, but a camera.
Turkell is not only an outrageously talented food photographer with multiple, drool-inducing cookbooks to his credit, he’s also the force behind the jaw-dropping Back of the House photo documentary series of life in and around kitchens. The former Edible Brooklyn and Edible Manhattan photo editor’s reverent perspective explores each kitchen with quivering accuracy.
In addition to all this, Turkell hosts what is hands-down one of the most engaging radio shows around, Food Seen. He interviews a range of guests, all of whom work with food, but perhaps aren’t typically highlighted in the media. Turkell’s authentic interest combined with an easy-going demeanor make the show a smooth listen.
These experiences combined give Turkell an exceptional vantage point on kitchens, restaurants, the behind-the-scenes of food and its stories.We spoke with him over the phone from his home in Brooklyn, where he generously shared some of his experiences and photos here. This is the first part of a two-part series with Turkell.
HogSalt: Tell me about working in kitchens. Is being a chef something you always thought you wanted to do?
Michael Harlan Turkell: Yeah, you know, it still happens sometimes that people think of it as this sort of servile profession because you’re in somebody else’s space, taking up somebody else’s time. I still don’t feel that way about photography. It’s a collaborative; it’s an additive thing. There are so many restaurants, and chefs, and food professionals that don’t just sit there and cook— they publicize themselves. They want to share information. Photography is quite a tool right now, be it through having a website, or having twitter, or posting photos on facebook. It’s become more invaluable than I thought. I didn’t know it was a position in the kitchen, but I really think it is now.
HS: Tell me about some of your favorite projects. I know you’ve got a couple going on, the Back of the House, for example. That’s a cool series.
MHT: Yeah, the Back of the House is just that’s what got me into it. That was my first project. It’s been over 10 years now that I’ve been venturing into kitchens and photographing the lives of chefs. So, it’s an ongoing project. I’m still stockpiling and contemplating what to do with it. I have aspirations of turning it into a cookbook, itself. So, I’m still figuring out that proposal. That’s led me on to cookbooks, which are kind of my favorite thing right now…. You really have to become like the mind’s eye of the chef, because you don’t want to represent them incorrectly. It’s their food— with your vision. It’s very methodical, like running a kitchen.
So I just finished one [a cookbook] with this guy, Chris Cosentino in San Francisco. I met him eight years ago at a conference, and he and I were just very in tune with our kitchen ideology. He focuses on offal, all the low cuts, guts, all the forgotten pieces of animals that get thrown away…. We’ve know each other for so long and I know his food intimately. I go out there once a year for the Head to Tail dinner event, so I’m with him for a few days: ideas percolate, formulate, get processed. So, this was a project that we’d been waiting to have come to fruition for awhile. It was actually simple, well not simple… no book is simple, let me rephrase that. I already knew what was going to happen. It wasn’t intuition. We had worked with each other for so long that I could just approach his food naturally. It was kind of an epiphany from other cookbooks that I had photographed.
HS: What was your first cookbook that you shot?
MHT: It was called The New Brooklyn Cookbook. It was kind of a logistical nightmare. But I would’ve been pissed if I’d heard that that project happened and I never got a chance to put my name in for consideration. But, I had been photographer first and then photo editor for Edible, Brooklyn. And I live in Brooklyn, so it’s kind of my borough, kind of my beat.
But it was 31 restaurants and 10 producers. And they wanted to photograph the food as well as photograph the ambiance at the restaurants. I had to go [to each restaurant] at least twice— once for the food, once for the ambiance…. I probably shot at least 100-150 different shoots just to be able to get what we got. I even used some stock that I had over the years; but it was a massive, massive project. And trying to coordinate with that many people. I just kind of went in with a caveat after awhile and said, ‘I’m going to show up and you can tell me whether or not you’re ready and we can shoot, or I’ll see you next time.’ I just sat on the F and the G trains in Brooklyn going round about trying to hit on all the spots.
HS: I want to ask you about Edible. That’s a fantastic job. How did that end up happening?
MHT: I just kept on bugging them until they said yes. I’d actually just moved to Brooklyn and they’d just launched; and I had been doing the Back of the House project in Boston and came to New York. I’d had a show at this place called the James Beard House, and things just sort of aligned. I also just kept on emailing them trying to get in touch and started shooting on their third issue. I have had a consistent series in it that until this last issue. I just actually left Edible at the end of the year.
HS: I wanted to ask you about something that I’ve found incredible, Food Seen, the radio show that you do. It seems relatively open, you interview people in the industry or people that are at least peripherally involved in restaurants and food.
MHT: Yeah. I wanted to hear from more parts of the industry rather than the forefront. You know, I think there’s such a highlight on chefs and certain people that are often in front of the lens or the media. There were so many pieces of a restaurant or the greater food system that I never heard from or about, so I was intrigued. From being a photographer, I’m kind of a Chatty Cathy. So it was hard for me with the magazine not to say anything. I wrote a couple of articles here and there, but once I heard about the radio station, I approached them with this idea. I was also sort of an art history buff in college and still am, and I wanted to be able to talk about some of these aspects from an aesthetic or visual sense rather than just from ‘yum that looks so good,’ or ‘that tastes great.’ So yeah it kind of started off with artists— actual artists who used food as their inspiration or their medium. But yeah, I try to get those periphery characters. Today I actually had a chef on, Amanda Cohen of Dirt Candy. She was talking about how to cook vegetables like meat. So it’s not necessarily any straightforward Q & A.
HS: But it’s really interesting. I’m a vegetarian, and I’d be curious to learn how to cook vegetables like meat.
MHT: It’s cool because she hasn’t tasted certain things, but understands flavor profiles, and carriers, and fats— certain things that have to happen to be able to create a flavor profile. So we were talking about fat in flora and in vegetables and How to get gristle and how to get my myartifect and how to get these things to happen simply in cooking vegetables. It’s a much broader scope than meat. Protein only has so many ester chains to it, where certain vegetables have that many more.
HS: Was it difficult to get into radio? Did you find yourself hesitant at all to jump over to that different aesthetic sensibility, talking to artisans and being in the spot light rather than behind the camera.
MHT: Yeah, I was a little star struck with my first few guests, because I also used it as a forum to talk to people that I really admired, from other food photographers to wonderful food writers. It wasn’t that I was apprehensive, it was more intimidation. Then I realized it’s just a conversation and I don’t have to deal with an audience, because I’m in a box with two other people and we’re not FCC regulated so if a curse slips out that’s fine. No, it was always exciting. It’s one of my favorite things to do every week, to go in and meet a new person and hear about what they do. I’d rather ask questions than give answers.
But yeah, I just wanted to highlight all the people that don’t get highlighted. And selfishly, learn from them, so if I ever want to become an knife-maker or open a restaurant, I know how to do it right.
HS: I think it’s great and It comes from this place of natural curiosity, to really learn about things from people around you. Tell me do you have a favorite interview or is there anything that sticks out?
MHT: Well yeah I mean, I’ve really become attached to the show, it’s been almost a year and a half and it’s just flown by, but there was this guy, Carl Warner who did a food landscape cookbook. He’s an amazing commercial photographer and he sets these amazing vistas made up of all edible things. I’ve read all his bios etc., thought I had these amazing notes on him and then we start talking, and he can’t even smell! And he’s on this set of fish sitting there rotting and the assistants have to leave and he can sit there and just photograph and that started getting me on this kick of synesthesia and really how you interpret food through different senses. This lead me to these other guys, the Jellymongers, Bompas and Parr. They do these amazing food art installations— one was a gin and tonic room. It was breathable gin and tonic and you went in there with a specific ventilator mask, and experienced that high without having that glass in hand. So kind of shifting, skewing the idea of what a social norm is. Or what drinking culture is.
Nikki McClure… do you know her work? She’s a paper cut artist, but she lives what she makes. So she makes these amazing paper cuts and she’s put a couple books out. One’s called, To Market to Market and it’s about respecting and understanding the process that goes into growing an apple or curing fish. She lives what sounds like an amazing rural, agrarian metropolitan life in Olympia, WA. And it’s just so great to see someone who lives by that before it was necessarily brought to the forefront. Who else? There’s just so many right now. I’m excited about some up-coming ones.
HS: Do you know what you want to do next? I love that you’re able to try so many different things and you’re so open to that.
MHT: I just finished another cookbook all about jam. I’m shooting an e-cookbook application right now, which is my first foray into dealing with the iPad— I’m playing a lot with interactivity. I love cookbooks. I collect them and have too many, and not enough space, but they’re limiting in not just their 2-dimensionality but in how a page reads, or at least I think so. So, really looking towards new ideas on how to experience a cookbook. I’m writing my own cookbook proposal right now, which should be exciting.
HS: You’re writing your own cookbook?
MHT: It’s gone through some iterations and it’s always evolving and changing, but I’d like to be able to write a cookbook from the perspective of people who are those ‘periphery.’ The people who have been on the food scene and their approach to food rather than the traditional chef’s approach to it. It’s one of many ideas. And then I’m also trying to turn the Back of the House, [photo series] into a book. I think that’s the number one goal right now.
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Our interview will be continued next week…. We’ll share more photos and talk with Turkell about what he doesn’t photograph, where he likes to eat, and his own onion jam recipe next week. Come back for seconds.
To listen to Food Seen
For more of Turkell’s photo work