FOOD & DRINK MODERNIST CUISINE PHOTOGR APHY BY NATHAN MYHRVOLDWHAT TO EXPECT FROM FOOD & DRINK Take a deep dive into Modernist Cuisine founder and photographer Nathan Myhrvold’s ever- evolving fascination with food in his new book Food & Drink: Modernist Cuisine Photography. This beautiful photo book features over 200 vibrant images showcasing food in new and surprising ways. Myhrvold uses cutting-edge photography techniques that combine custom- built cameras and robotics with creativity, endless curiosity, and the willingness to get drenched with wine on occasion. The results are blueberries shot to appear like boulders, condiments exploding out of cannons, and wine catapulted to create the perfect splash. This collection of Myhrvold’s images is organized into thematic sections focused on core elements of his food photography and comes packaged in a new shelf-friendly trim size with a slipcase. From an aerial shot of the gentle carved shapes in a wheat field after harvest to the magnified view of the colorful corona of a tomato seed, Food & Drink captures stunning details of the foods and drinks we love from a fresh, playful perspective. SPECIFICATIONS 13.5” x 10.315” landscape hardcover book with slipcase 216 pages Over 200 color photographs Over twenty full-spread panoramic images, measuring 27” x 10.315” Ribbon marker FOOD & DRINK MODE RNIS T CUISINE P HO T OGR A P H Y BY NAT HAN MYHRVOL D ISBN: 978-1-7379951-3-5 SRP: $99.00 USD / $99.00 CAD / £79.95 / €89.95 / $160.00 AUSWHAT TO EXPECT FROM FOOD & DRINK Take a deep dive into Modernist Cuisine founder and photographer Nathan Myhrvold’s ever- evolving fascination with food in his new book Food & Drink: Modernist Cuisine Photography. This beautiful photo book features over 200 vibrant images showcasing food in new and surprising ways. Myhrvold uses cutting-edge photography techniques that combine custom- built cameras and robotics with creativity, endless curiosity, and the willingness to get drenched with wine on occasion. The results are blueberries shot to appear like boulders, condiments exploding out of cannons, and wine catapulted to create the perfect splash. This collection of Myhrvold’s images is organized into thematic sections focused on core elements of his food photography and comes packaged in a new shelf-friendly trim size with a slipcase. From an aerial shot of the gentle carved shapes in a wheat field after harvest to the magnified view of the colorful corona of a tomato seed, Food & Drink captures stunning details of the foods and drinks we love from a fresh, playful perspective. SPECIFICATIONS 13.5” x 10.315” landscape hardcover book with slipcase 216 pages Over 200 color photographs Over twenty full-spread panoramic images, measuring 27” x 10.315” Ribbon marker FOOD & DRINK MODE RNIS T CUISINE P HO T OGR A P H Y BY NAT HAN MYHRVOL D ISBN: 978-1-7379951-3-5 SRP: $99.00 USD / $99.00 CAD / £79.95 / €89.95 / $160.00 AUSBOOK CONTENTS MY PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY THE STORY OF THIS BOOK THE SPEED OF THE PHOTOGRAPHY THE SCALE OF THE PHOTOGRAPHY A CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVE PLAYING WITH YOUR FOOD STILL-LIFE PHOTOGRAPHY FOOD PORTRAITS PHOTO INDEX Nathan has never shied away from getting up close and personal with the subjects of his photos, be they the seeds on the outside of a strawberry (see Achenes on page 103) or a splashing glass of wine that will likely drench him (see page 21). MY PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY As a general rule, people discard most of their childhood interests as they grow up. Many children are mesmerized by stars when they are little, but their fascination eventually fades. They rarely think about them as adults—except perhaps to gaze up at the night sky during a camping trip. I am one of the exceptions to that rule. Although my interests have strayed a bit over the years, I still devote a lot of time and energy to science and natural phenomena, including conducting research on asteroids and writing scientific papers about them. Sure, on one level this work is serious science, but like child’s play it is motivated by a sense of awe and wonder. Cooking is another childhood interest of mine that I held on to into adulthood. An interest in food is less unusual for an adult than an interest in the vast expanse of space, but I took it more seriously than most. In the 1990s, I took a leave of absence from my job as a senior executive at Microsoft to attend culinary school in France. That further kindled the spark, and several years later I did something even crazier: I decided to write a cookbook, which grew as I and others worked on it, and became the six volumes and 2,438 pages of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. I decided early in that project that the book would be heavily illustrated with photography, and the photos had such an impact that we made photography a centerpiece of every book that we have published since then. Our third book, The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, focused exclusively on the photos from our previous books. As a boy, I had been given a plastic camera; it became my constant companion. By the time I was 11, I was on the hunt for a better camera despite having almost no money to spend on one. I spotted a Zeiss Contax II range-finder camera at a Salva- tion Army thrift store. First introduced in 1936, the Contax II was a strong rival of Leica’s 35mm range-finder camera and was favored by many photojournalists. The Contax that I found in 1971 was a bit past its prime. But I was thrilled none- theless, and I bought it, along with a 50mm f/2 Sonnar lens, for $2. Not long after, I found two more secondhand lenses: 35mm and 135mm Nikkor lenses originally made for the Nikon SP, which was a Contax-clone range finder that emerged in the 1950s. I became deeply immersed in photography. At age 13, I decided I needed bigger guns. I bought a used Deardorff 5 × 7 view camera and a couple of lenses, including a Goerz Dagor. I converted one of the bath- rooms in our house to a darkroom—I informed my mother only after I had coated every surface with matte black paint—and made my own prints. Photographic equipment has come a long way since that $2 camera, and fortunately my budget has also grown a bit since then. This book is in many ways a culmination of my lifelong interest in photography, in much the same way that Modernist Cuisine and our subsequent books were milestones of my interest in food.BOOK CONTENTS MY PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY THE STORY OF THIS BOOK THE SPEED OF THE PHOTOGRAPHY THE SCALE OF THE PHOTOGRAPHY A CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVE PLAYING WITH YOUR FOOD STILL-LIFE PHOTOGRAPHY FOOD PORTRAITS PHOTO INDEX Nathan has never shied away from getting up close and personal with the subjects of his photos, be they the seeds on the outside of a strawberry (see Achenes on page 103) or a splashing glass of wine that will likely drench him (see page 21). MY PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY As a general rule, people discard most of their childhood interests as they grow up. Many children are mesmerized by stars when they are little, but their fascination eventually fades. They rarely think about them as adults—except perhaps to gaze up at the night sky during a camping trip. I am one of the exceptions to that rule. Although my interests have strayed a bit over the years, I still devote a lot of time and energy to science and natural phenomena, including conducting research on asteroids and writing scientific papers about them. Sure, on one level this work is serious science, but like child’s play it is motivated by a sense of awe and wonder. Cooking is another childhood interest of mine that I held on to into adulthood. An interest in food is less unusual for an adult than an interest in the vast expanse of space, but I took it more seriously than most. In the 1990s, I took a leave of absence from my job as a senior executive at Microsoft to attend culinary school in France. That further kindled the spark, and several years later I did something even crazier: I decided to write a cookbook, which grew as I and others worked on it, and became the six volumes and 2,438 pages of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. I decided early in that project that the book would be heavily illustrated with photography, and the photos had such an impact that we made photography a centerpiece of every book that we have published since then. Our third book, The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, focused exclusively on the photos from our previous books. As a boy, I had been given a plastic camera; it became my constant companion. By the time I was 11, I was on the hunt for a better camera despite having almost no money to spend on one. I spotted a Zeiss Contax II range-finder camera at a Salva- tion Army thrift store. First introduced in 1936, the Contax II was a strong rival of Leica’s 35mm range-finder camera and was favored by many photojournalists. The Contax that I found in 1971 was a bit past its prime. But I was thrilled none- theless, and I bought it, along with a 50mm f/2 Sonnar lens, for $2. Not long after, I found two more secondhand lenses: 35mm and 135mm Nikkor lenses originally made for the Nikon SP, which was a Contax-clone range finder that emerged in the 1950s. I became deeply immersed in photography. At age 13, I decided I needed bigger guns. I bought a used Deardorff 5 × 7 view camera and a couple of lenses, including a Goerz Dagor. I converted one of the bath- rooms in our house to a darkroom—I informed my mother only after I had coated every surface with matte black paint—and made my own prints. Photographic equipment has come a long way since that $2 camera, and fortunately my budget has also grown a bit since then. This book is in many ways a culmination of my lifelong interest in photography, in much the same way that Modernist Cuisine and our subsequent books were milestones of my interest in food.THE STORY OF THIS BOOK Every photograph tells a story. A good one grabs your attention both emotionally and intellectually, with a one-two punch that transmits its message in a profound, visceral way. It’s said that a photo is worth a thousand words, but in truth no amount of words can communicate everything a photo does. It is ineffable. And every story has a back- story: the context in which a photograph was made, the motive and ideas that brought it into being. Of course, not all backstories add to the message of the work itself. You can certainly enjoy Ansel Adams’s photo Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico without knowing that he caught the moment serendipitously while driving along a highway at dusk or that astronomers used the position of the moon relative to the mountains in the photo to calculate the time that Adams shot it (4:49:20 p.m. on November 1, 1941). But sometimes the backstory of how a photograph came to be does help inform how we experience the image. It is with this in mind that I tell the backstory of this book and its photos. When I decided to create a cookbook over a decade ago, I saw an exciting opportunity to do something new in food photography—to portray food in new and unexpected ways that simultaneously draw readers in and illustrate the science at work in cooking. Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking was a big, crazy bet, as were its two sequels, Modernist Cuisine at Home and The Photography of Mod- ernist Cuisine. And the crazy bets kept coming: in November 2017, we released Modernist Bread, a six volume, 2,600-page book all about bread. And in October 2021, we published Modernist Pizza, a four volume set about one of the world’s most popular foods. But maybe the bets weren’t that crazy after all. So far, about 370,000 copies of our books are in print worldwide in nine different languages. Modernist Cuisine broke many of the rules for cookbooks, includ- ing how they should be illustrated. When I began working on the book, I wanted to explain the scientific principles that govern how cooking actually works and comprehensively cover all of the modern culinary techniques practiced by the best and most advanced chefs in the world. But it occurred to me that a conventional, text-heavy book on these topics might be a bit intimidating to all but a limited audience. The book also had to be visually captivating. It was an audacious goal. People have been taking pictures of food for well over a century—and paintings of food were popular for many centuries before that. Cookbooks, magazines, TV shows, and advertising bombard us with images of food, and our exposure to the genre continues to increase thanks to Pinterest, Facebook, Insta- gram, and myriad food blogs. How could we possibly stand out from this blizzard of food photos? My team and I set about developing an approach to food photography that leveraged technology to capture something new. Digital photography and the software editing tools it has spawned are merely the latest in a long line of inventions that enable us to make images in new ways. The replacement of film by digital sensors has brought some powerful benefits, including superior resolution, better performance in dim light, and a wider dynamic range. Don’t get me wrong. Many of the most beautiful photos ever made were shot in natural light (as were many of the photos in this book, such as Paths of Harvest on page 76), and the same is true of film. A personal favorite of mine is Edward Weston’s Pepper No. 30, which was shot in low light on black-and-white film with such a low ISO that the exposure took six minutes. But Weston didn’t make the photo that way because of some ideological commitment—he was simply using the best technology that was available to him in 1930. All art involves some amount of technology. The invention of oil painting radically changed what paintings looked like, for example. While this has always been true for the creation of art, it is profoundly so for photography because the medium requires both advanced optics and chemistry to capture images on film. The technology of photography is now changing almost daily, and we’ve embraced that. People have realized that computers and algorithms are as powerful, if not more powerful, than optics as a means of recording light via a sensor. These capabilities can be deployed in lots of different ways, and panoramic stitching is one of them. The ability to take a panoramic photo like Almond Fields on pages 100–101 would require a sensor that would be difficult for anyone to make, and even if you could, it would be utterly unaffordable. By taking multiple pictures of a still subject and stitching them together, however, you can do something amazing. You can also cheat the optics of depth of field, which have long been a constraint on which parts of an image can be in focus. It turns out that with computers, these constraints are all but nonexistent. The ability to take multiple photos at different focal distances and focus points, and then combine them to make a single image that’s completely in focus is astonishing. You might say that’s cheating. When you get down to it, all of photography is cheating in some sense. Color photography is fundamentally taking pictures with different filters on them to re-create or reinterpret what the eye sees. The camera allows you to capture the light of this otherwise incredibly ephemeral thing and make it permanent. Many of these new technologies and discoveries, plus those we don’t even know yet, are tools that can be used creatively to do something extraordinary. My photographs were taken with this philosophy in mind. Along with using the latest technology, my team and I bucked conventions for food photography. I opted instead to cut kitchen equipment in half to give people a look inside food as it cooks, capture alluring per- spectives of food with high-speed video and research microscopes, and turn simple ingredients like strawberries and grains of wheat into stunning monoliths with macro lenses. My team and I custom-built cameras and lenses, developed special software for editing, built Nathan was inspired by photographers like Edward Weston and Irving Penn to reexamine the ways we see food, and this led him to push the boundaries with his food images in each of the Modernist Cuisine projects that he has helmed. robots to perfectly sync motion with the camera’s shutter, and experimented with new photography techniques. Almost immediately after my first book appeared, people started asking me where they could buy photographic prints of the images. Encouraged by the feedback, I decided to select some of the best images from our library of more than 200,000 photos (at that time) and print them as a collection, even larger and on nicer paper than in my previous books. The result was The Photography of Modernist Cuisine. The photos spoke to people who see food as we do at Modernist Cuisine—as something that inspires passion and curiosity. And there have never been more people who self-identify as foodies. Food is an important aspect of many people’s lives, which is why art about food should be available to them. I then decided to open our own gallery, now with multiple locations, which seemed like the right fit for getting the photos into the hands of the people who wanted them. The vast majority of the photos in this book are also prominently displayed in our gallery spaces. We have organized the photographs in this book into six sections. Some of my most recent photos capture subject matter that is moving too quickly to be easily seen by the human eye, such as a champagne cork flying out of a bottle (see pages 26–27), so we dedicated a chapter called The Speed of the Photography to photos that highlight the speed at which they were taken. Another chapter, The Scale of the Photography, is devoted to the scope of the images and features photos that run the gamut from large landscapes to things that can only be seen under a microscope. The third chapter, A Change in Perspective, collects some of our photos that reveal a look inside food and what happens inside pots and ovens as you cook. As you have probably guessed, we like to have fun when we take our photos, so we also created a chapter called Playing with Your Food. Our final two chapters divide a group of our food photographs into two categories commonly found in the art world: Still-Life Photography and Food Portraits. Gastronome Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously said, “Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are.” Food is a significant part of our identity. What we eat has never been more important to us than it is today. It’s one of the ways that we define cultures, different groups of people, and ourselves as individuals. Our relationship with food is deeply personal, but also something that helps us build relationships with others. Food as art is an expression of those values. We hope that these photographs allow people to indulge in who they are and express how food makes them feel. For me, food and drink are endlessly fascinating—they’re a combination of art and alchemy, history and creativity, discovery and invention. This book is a reflec- tion of that passion and a bold guess that others will share our desire for an art- quality book that immerses readers in vistas of food that are familiar yet profoundly new. Our hope is that others will experience the childlike wonder and curiosity that we feel when we look at these pictures.THE STORY OF THIS BOOK Every photograph tells a story. A good one grabs your attention both emotionally and intellectually, with a one-two punch that transmits its message in a profound, visceral way. It’s said that a photo is worth a thousand words, but in truth no amount of words can communicate everything a photo does. It is ineffable. And every story has a back- story: the context in which a photograph was made, the motive and ideas that brought it into being. Of course, not all backstories add to the message of the work itself. You can certainly enjoy Ansel Adams’s photo Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico without knowing that he caught the moment serendipitously while driving along a highway at dusk or that astronomers used the position of the moon relative to the mountains in the photo to calculate the time that Adams shot it (4:49:20 p.m. on November 1, 1941). But sometimes the backstory of how a photograph came to be does help inform how we experience the image. It is with this in mind that I tell the backstory of this book and its photos. When I decided to create a cookbook over a decade ago, I saw an exciting opportunity to do something new in food photography—to portray food in new and unexpected ways that simultaneously draw readers in and illustrate the science at work in cooking. Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking was a big, crazy bet, as were its two sequels, Modernist Cuisine at Home and The Photography of Mod- ernist Cuisine. And the crazy bets kept coming: in November 2017, we released Modernist Bread, a six volume, 2,600-page book all about bread. And in October 2021, we published Modernist Pizza, a four volume set about one of the world’s most popular foods. But maybe the bets weren’t that crazy after all. So far, about 370,000 copies of our books are in print worldwide in nine different languages. Modernist Cuisine broke many of the rules for cookbooks, includ- ing how they should be illustrated. When I began working on the book, I wanted to explain the scientific principles that govern how cooking actually works and comprehensively cover all of the modern culinary techniques practiced by the best and most advanced chefs in the world. But it occurred to me that a conventional, text-heavy book on these topics might be a bit intimidating to all but a limited audience. The book also had to be visually captivating. It was an audacious goal. People have been taking pictures of food for well over a century—and paintings of food were popular for many centuries before that. Cookbooks, magazines, TV shows, and advertising bombard us with images of food, and our exposure to the genre continues to increase thanks to Pinterest, Facebook, Insta- gram, and myriad food blogs. How could we possibly stand out from this blizzard of food photos? My team and I set about developing an approach to food photography that leveraged technology to capture something new. Digital photography and the software editing tools it has spawned are merely the latest in a long line of inventions that enable us to make images in new ways. The replacement of film by digital sensors has brought some powerful benefits, including superior resolution, better performance in dim light, and a wider dynamic range. Don’t get me wrong. Many of the most beautiful photos ever made were shot in natural light (as were many of the photos in this book, such as Paths of Harvest on page 76), and the same is true of film. A personal favorite of mine is Edward Weston’s Pepper No. 30, which was shot in low light on black-and-white film with such a low ISO that the exposure took six minutes. But Weston didn’t make the photo that way because of some ideological commitment—he was simply using the best technology that was available to him in 1930. All art involves some amount of technology. The invention of oil painting radically changed what paintings looked like, for example. While this has always been true for the creation of art, it is profoundly so for photography because the medium requires both advanced optics and chemistry to capture images on film. The technology of photography is now changing almost daily, and we’ve embraced that. People have realized that computers and algorithms are as powerful, if not more powerful, than optics as a means of recording light via a sensor. These capabilities can be deployed in lots of different ways, and panoramic stitching is one of them. The ability to take a panoramic photo like Almond Fields on pages 100–101 would require a sensor that would be difficult for anyone to make, and even if you could, it would be utterly unaffordable. By taking multiple pictures of a still subject and stitching them together, however, you can do something amazing. You can also cheat the optics of depth of field, which have long been a constraint on which parts of an image can be in focus. It turns out that with computers, these constraints are all but nonexistent. The ability to take multiple photos at different focal distances and focus points, and then combine them to make a single image that’s completely in focus is astonishing. You might say that’s cheating. When you get down to it, all of photography is cheating in some sense. Color photography is fundamentally taking pictures with different filters on them to re-create or reinterpret what the eye sees. The camera allows you to capture the light of this otherwise incredibly ephemeral thing and make it permanent. Many of these new technologies and discoveries, plus those we don’t even know yet, are tools that can be used creatively to do something extraordinary. My photographs were taken with this philosophy in mind. Along with using the latest technology, my team and I bucked conventions for food photography. I opted instead to cut kitchen equipment in half to give people a look inside food as it cooks, capture alluring per- spectives of food with high-speed video and research microscopes, and turn simple ingredients like strawberries and grains of wheat into stunning monoliths with macro lenses. My team and I custom-built cameras and lenses, developed special software for editing, built Nathan was inspired by photographers like Edward Weston and Irving Penn to reexamine the ways we see food, and this led him to push the boundaries with his food images in each of the Modernist Cuisine projects that he has helmed. robots to perfectly sync motion with the camera’s shutter, and experimented with new photography techniques. Almost immediately after my first book appeared, people started asking me where they could buy photographic prints of the images. Encouraged by the feedback, I decided to select some of the best images from our library of more than 200,000 photos (at that time) and print them as a collection, even larger and on nicer paper than in my previous books. The result was The Photography of Modernist Cuisine. The photos spoke to people who see food as we do at Modernist Cuisine—as something that inspires passion and curiosity. And there have never been more people who self-identify as foodies. Food is an important aspect of many people’s lives, which is why art about food should be available to them. I then decided to open our own gallery, now with multiple locations, which seemed like the right fit for getting the photos into the hands of the people who wanted them. The vast majority of the photos in this book are also prominently displayed in our gallery spaces. We have organized the photographs in this book into six sections. Some of my most recent photos capture subject matter that is moving too quickly to be easily seen by the human eye, such as a champagne cork flying out of a bottle (see pages 26–27), so we dedicated a chapter called The Speed of the Photography to photos that highlight the speed at which they were taken. Another chapter, The Scale of the Photography, is devoted to the scope of the images and features photos that run the gamut from large landscapes to things that can only be seen under a microscope. The third chapter, A Change in Perspective, collects some of our photos that reveal a look inside food and what happens inside pots and ovens as you cook. As you have probably guessed, we like to have fun when we take our photos, so we also created a chapter called Playing with Your Food. Our final two chapters divide a group of our food photographs into two categories commonly found in the art world: Still-Life Photography and Food Portraits. Gastronome Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously said, “Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are.” Food is a significant part of our identity. What we eat has never been more important to us than it is today. It’s one of the ways that we define cultures, different groups of people, and ourselves as individuals. Our relationship with food is deeply personal, but also something that helps us build relationships with others. Food as art is an expression of those values. We hope that these photographs allow people to indulge in who they are and express how food makes them feel. For me, food and drink are endlessly fascinating—they’re a combination of art and alchemy, history and creativity, discovery and invention. This book is a reflec- tion of that passion and a bold guess that others will share our desire for an art- quality book that immerses readers in vistas of food that are familiar yet profoundly new. Our hope is that others will experience the childlike wonder and curiosity that we feel when we look at these pictures.opposite page MORNING CLOUDS | A perfectly brewed cup of coffee with cream is a thing of beauty in and of itself. In this cutaway view, we see the pattern made as the cream, which is lighter than the coffee but also colder, plunges to the bottom of the cup and forms bil- lowing clouds that rise to the surface. This image was shot using a break-beam sensor to trigger the pitcher to pour the cream, allow- ing the cream to behave in a surprisingly repeatable way. left TIGER STRIPES | The flow and appearance of espresso changes as a shot is pulled. Using water pressure, the shot is pulled through the portafilter. The initial trickle of dark brown liquid begins to flow more quickly and lightens in color, and then golden bands resem- bling tiger stripes appear in the stream of coffee. The espresso’s flavor changes as much as the color—different compounds are extracted as pulling the shot progresses.opposite page MORNING CLOUDS | A perfectly brewed cup of coffee with cream is a thing of beauty in and of itself. In this cutaway view, we see the pattern made as the cream, which is lighter than the coffee but also colder, plunges to the bottom of the cup and forms bil- lowing clouds that rise to the surface. This image was shot using a break-beam sensor to trigger the pitcher to pour the cream, allow- ing the cream to behave in a surprisingly repeatable way. left TIGER STRIPES | The flow and appearance of espresso changes as a shot is pulled. Using water pressure, the shot is pulled through the portafilter. The initial trickle of dark brown liquid begins to flow more quickly and lightens in color, and then golden bands resem- bling tiger stripes appear in the stream of coffee. The espresso’s flavor changes as much as the color—different compounds are extracted as pulling the shot progresses.Next >