Food Styling

Food styling is an art form and a specialised field for a career. It relies greatly on the knowledge of food and also on the design sense and designing expertise.

- Michael Swamy

Associated with style and glamour, the job requires ample skill, creativity, meticulous craftsmanship and patience.

It also involves great communication skills as the food stylist should ideally facilitate the aroma, texture and taste of the food to reach the onlooker through a photograph. It is the job of the stylist to make the food look appealing, natural and not too complicated.

Maturation of Food Styling

When I started out as a food stylist in India, there were very few of us in the field. Even today, there are very few food stylists in the country who pursue the career after learning the craft professionally. In my case too, it was only after a couple of years of working in the food & beverage industry that I decided to try my hand at specialising in something different that would also give me a chance to improve on my hobby of photography. It was at the Le Cordon Bleu in London when I stumbled across the exciting field of food styling and on a copy of a book on the same topic. On my return to Mumbai, I decided to make a break into food styling.

When I started out in the career of food styling, I would mostly get offers for styling for images that went onto masala packets, pasta packets and tiny print ads wherein the picture of the food I styled was often of the same size as that of a postal stamp.

But today, my scope of work encompasses cookery books, packaging, recipe booklets, newspaper articles, images for the Internet, television ad films, YouTube videos, food-based shows and movies. Styling Indian food is tough, but my experience with French cuisine and pre-plated ideas, using classical items and fabrics as props, has gone a long way into shooting interesting photographs pertaining to Indian food.

What it Takes?