“Recipes” photo series captures ingredients floating in mid-air

Cookbooks usually all follow a similar recipe (pun intended). In the vast majority of cases, they consist of more or less professionally taken images of dishes, along with a list of ingredients and a set of instruction on how to prepare them. Alternative approaches to this classic way of illustrating recipes are rare.

German designer Nora Luther and photographer Pavel Becker decided to approach the topic of preparing meals a littel differently. For their apty titled series "Recipes," the two chose to display the ingredients of a dish, in the exact quantities required by the respective recipe, in a single photograph, floating mid-air above various items of tableware.

Luther, who is a freelance designer specializing in conceptual design, art direction and print layout, and Becker, a freelance photographer, share a studio in Berlin's culturally diverse borough of Kreuzberg. With "Recipes," the duo has dedicated a photographic series to "one of life's greatest pleasures."

The "recipe" for each photograph in the series was to include the exact ingredients in the exact quantities required, so that "a glimpse on the recipe lets you know what youre going to cook. You don't even need to know how to read." As for the photographic techniqued used to create the images, Luther tells Imaging Resource they "would like to leave [it] to the imagination of [the] beholder."

Luther also tells us that so far, the series is still a concept. As to how it could be turned into an actual cookbook, there's an example that was created for the Giro d'Italia 2013 cycling tournament, which combines a photograph of the ingredients for a dish called 'green dumplings' on one page with a minimalistic instruction on how to prepare the dish on the other.

So far, there's no word on whether this concept will eventually lead to an actually cookbook by Luther and Becker. But if it does, it will surely be the one with the most creative approach to food photography.

All images in this article are © Nora Luther and Pavel Backer and are used with permission.

(via PetaPixel)