Cooking Up a Book With My Mother

This year I've been photographing a cookbook with, and for, my mother, shot entirely at her home. The end goal is a gift, a collection of her favourite recipes from a lifetime of cooking, put together for me, my siblings, and the family to keep. There's something different about making a book with the person who raised me and who taught you to cook in the first place, and watching that come full circle through the camera.

My mother runs the whole thing like a professional. Every recipe is tested and written out well ahead of the day, she's prepped about four dishes before I've even come down for my coffee, and yet she's still endlessly creative and happy to adapt on the spot if the light or the moment calls for something different. She's one of the hardest working people I know, and building something together, recipe by recipe, has been genuinely the most fulfilling work I've done.

We have no prop stylist, no props cupboard to raid, just what's already in her cupboards and on her shelves, so every plate, board, and glass in this book is hers. It's forced a kind of resourcefulness I've loved, working with what's genuinely there rather than what's been sourced to look a certain way. The result feels more honest.

Whenever we can, we shoot outside in her garden, using whatever she's grown the weeks leading up to it, and building the whole scene around the produce and the roses rather than the other way round.

It's an ongoing project, so there'll be more of her kitchen, and her garden, in the months to come, until every recipe she's ever loved has a place in the book.