These Photos of Chefs’ Burned Hands Are the Anti-Food Porn
All photos by Katie Wilson

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Food

These Photos of Chefs’ Burned Hands Are the Anti-Food Porn

One London-based photographer has taken portraits of the burned and scarred hands of fifty London chefs like James Lowe and Margot and Fergus Henderson. Feast your eyes on the war wounds behind that brunch you just Instagrammed.
Phoebe Hurst
London, GB

There's no denying it, we've become weirdly obsessed with photographing our food. Maybe it started with a holiday snap of some paella you ate in Tenerife or a grainy "I made soup!" Facebook pic. But just look at what a mess all that precision plate dressing has landed us in. Now we've got parody New Nordic Instagram accounts and 450 quid Guardian Masterclasses on how to take photos of your lunch. Think about that next time you lomo-fi your latte.

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There's nothing wrong with wanting to make a visual representation of stuff we're about to eat or drink, it's what human beings have been doing since prehistoric times (along with all the penis drawings). The problem is that there are only so many coiffed avocado on toast shots anyone can look at before they all merge into one indeterminate, green fug. And that's extremely unappetising.

READ MORE: The Crazy Life of a Chef Is Nothing to Celebrate

This food photo fatigue is what makes Katie Wilson's Fifty Chefs-The Hands That Feed London project so interesting. The photographer's latest exhibition comprises portraits of—yup, you got it—fifty chefs from across the capital. One photograph catches them in a pause between service and the second is a close-up of their hands.

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Margot Henderson.

The results are fascinating. There's Margot Henderson's scarred forefinger, James Lowe with a tea towel slung on his hip, and endless singed wrists and hastily clingfilmed cuts.

Wilson's blood-sweat-and-beetroot-juice approach is a million miles from the artful plates these chefs send out of their kitchens (and the ones we fill our social media feeds with) and it's jarring to see the griddle-pan burns that go into making your brunch.

I sat down with Wilson to find out what chefs' beaten up hands can tell us about food and the way we eat.

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Margot Henderson's hands.

MUNCHIES: Hi Katie, how did the Fifty Chefs project get started? Katie Wilson: A couple of my friends are chefs and I'd meet up with them and look at the state of their hands and the burns—it started from there really. It got me thinking about what they were doing in the kitchen and how they got these injuries, but evolved into being more about hands, rather than being specifically about the scars. It's the story different people's hands tell.

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You've got everyone in there from Michelin-starred chefs to those that work in small, family-run cafes. How did you choose who to include? The project was driven entirely by recommendations. I started with my friends and they would recommend different people, but then people like Mark Hix recommended Mangal, a Turkish kebab place. It was important for it not all to be Michelin-starred chefs or even just the high end places. Most people I would ask, where do you go on a Thursday night? and these were some of the answers.

It's not always about the quality of the food, either, it's more the places that Londoners really love. A lot of the cafes like Arthur's might not be around in another 20 years. I felt a little bit of responsibility to get everyone in, I could have kept going!

Hussein of Mangal.

You started taking photos of these chefs and kitchen staff ten years ago. How has London's food scene changed since then? The journey has been fascinating. When I started this, we didn't have the behind-the-scenes kitchen coverage or Saturday morning cooking shows, but food is everywhere now and everyone seems to be a "foodie." The fantastic part about that is that it's improved the quality of food—where Carluccio's might have been the best place to get coffee ten years ago, that's not the case anymore.

Going into all the restaurants and the kitchens, I've feel like I've got quite an amazing social archive of photos! Talking to the porters, potato peelers, and the young people who work in kitchens, and seeing where they're from—that's changed with migration in the last ten years, as well as the type of restaurants people are interested in.

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Mark Hix.

And how did you go about taking the photos? The photos all look like they've been shot in a studio, but the reality was that I would come and set up with lights and a background in between service. The chefs would walk out of the kitchen, stand, and have their photograph taken. Some of them have sweat on them or beetroot stains on their fingers—it's very real.

When were were shooting at Nobu, they would be having their staff meal and some of the chefs would be curled up having a snooze! To see that side of it and to tie that in with knowing who these people are, it's just a different type of image.

Arthur Woodham's hand. Arthur Woodham of Arthur's Cafe.

It's shows a very human side to the restaurant industry I like foodies, I'm drawn to them—the fact that these people want to provide sustenance to others. It takes a certain type of person to have the motivation to nourish you. With all the hype around food, it's easy to forget this very simple act of nourishing a stranger

And the scars and burns on chefs' hands are a physical reflection of this Yes, there's no escaping the tactile nature of using your hands in that way. You can't fake good food, either. I used to work in the fashion industry and I think there's something special about the honesty of food, and how nice people are in the industry.

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James Lowe

Were chefs embarrassed to reveal their beaten up hands or did they show them off like battle scars? People are pretty proud and they remember what each mark is from. They're like, that was the oven, this was when I was doing oysters, this was when I nearly lost my finger. They're pretty nasty injuries, but nobody was like, don't look at my hands!

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Did anything surprise you about different chefs' hands? It's interesting, people like Michel Roux or Angela Hartnett didn't have many marks and they're both very well presented—no dirty stains on their aprons. It's a kind of personality thing, I don't mean that if you're burned. you're not a good cook! It could be that maybe you're a bit more passionate. It's just tells a different story.

Fergus Henderson's hand.

Tell me about the charity Fifty Chefs is supporting All the profits from the exhibition's print sales are going to FareShare, which is a UK charity that works to tackle food waste and food poverty. It's such a privilege to be able to sit here and talk about all the places we can eat but there's another side to that. A lot of the chefs photographed—like Fergus Henderson with his idea of nose-to-tail eating—are also very aware of the problem of food waste.

Fergus Henderson.

A lot of the food photography we see nowadays is beautifully arranged dishes and arty shots of what we had for dinner. Did you see these photos as a kind of antidote to "food porn"? I wanted it to be very honest, there's grading in the photos but no retouching. With my background in fashion photography and the perfection and artifice—which is wonderful and has it's place—I wanted to do something very raw and honest. I never want someone to look ugly or at their worst, or for food to look unappetising, but I am concerned with reality. It's maybe a little backlash to all of that.

And nothing's more honest than food. Thanks for talking with me, Katie.