Someone recently asked Catrine Kelty, of Buxton, what she did for a living. She told them she’s a food stylist.

“They were like, ‘What is that?'” Kelty said. “I told them, ‘You know when you have a cookbook, and you make the recipe and it doesn’t look as good as it does in the picture? Well, that’s my fault. I’m the one you curse because it doesn’t look like the picture.’

“I view myself as an artist and food is my medium,” she added. “This is kind of a way of sharing beauty with readers or the audience.”

Alna-based food stylist Sheila Jarnes, who has done work for America’s Test Kitchen, Fresh Market, King Arthur Baking Company and Pellegrino, among other clients, said that she gets a lot of confused looks when she mentions her profession. “They are a little baffled,” Jarnes said. “I often have to explain, every time you look at a cookbook or magazine or see an ad with food in it, there is a person who had to cook that food and make it look presentable for the camera.”

Even though anyone posting on Instagram to show off their home-cooked meals has done at least some rudimentary food styling, the job of professional food stylist “is still pretty unknown,” said Biddeford-based food stylist Chantal Lambeth, who’s worked in the field for nearly 20 years. “People jump to, ‘Oh, so you’re a chef.’ ”

But as Lambeth explained, while both jobs involve cooking, food stylists have a much more visual obsession with their work.

“I tell people I cook a lot of food, but it’s less in the chef role and more in an artistic role,” Lambeth said. “In a lot of cases, you’re more focused on the beauty than the taste. The food styling part of it is about having a bit of perfectionism when it comes to the beauty of it.”

In a sense, food stylists play with food for a living, but their play is strategic and intentional. The work requires a particular skill set: cooking talent combined with an ability to envision, produce and then display a particular food or ingredient in its most appealing, inviting form. When you see photos in magazines, cookbooks or ads of dramatically twirled pasta, spanking-fresh salads, or mouth-wateringly juicy burgers topped with pristine lettuce and bedewed tomato slices, the food stylist is largely responsible for making you hungry.

The food stylists we talked to estimated there are likely just a handful of people in their field based in Maine. While they do some work locally for in-state clients – or for out-of-state clients via remote work technology – they often travel to other states (and sometimes abroad) for jobs, so it helps to be in striking distance of a big city like Boston. They added that social media helps them stay connected within the industry, and by displaying their own work on platforms like Instagram, they can keep potential clients and other food professionals abreast of their latest work even from small towns in Maine.

BUILDING HERO BURGERS

Achieving a level of visual, hunger-inducing perfection doesn’t happen easily or quickly, even for experienced stylists. Consider the work Kelty put into a 2023 photo shoot for Atlantic Sea Farms’ sea veggie burgers, working with Maine photographer Nicole Wolf.

Kelty was tasked with styling two of the Biddeford company’s frozen burger varieties – basil pesto and ginger sesame – for images that would adorn the front of their boxes.

Kelty has styled close to 100 cookbooks since starting her work in the late ’90s, and has worked on shoots for Downeast, Edible Maine and Yankee magazines. Her Maine-based clients include Browne Trading, Papi and Rosemont Market & Bakery.

She knew from experience that the Atlantic Sea Farms job required her to make two absolute knockout burgers. “These images are going to be living on the box, in the freezer (section of the supermarket), so it’s going to really stand out,” she said.

Kelty had consulted with Atlantic Sea Farms staff beforehand to devise a general concept for each. The plan was for the basil pesto patties to be topped with lettuce, tomato, onion and cheese like a standard cheeseburger, while the ginger sesame patty would be topped more like a Vietnamese banh mi sandwich with pickled onion, shredded carrot, cucumber slices and cilantro sprigs.

But then on set, it was time to obsess over the little things. No detail is too small in a “hero” or “beauty” shot like this, as they’re called in the field.

“I chose the best, curliest, most beautiful piece of lettuce,” Kelty said. “And I had maybe three heads of lettuce (on set) to get that one leaf. And then I want the perfect slice of tomato, so I slice five or six tomatoes.”

Kelty cooked about six patties in a skillet according to package directions, then took the best-looking ones and used a heat gun to brown them more evenly along the edges that would be visible in the shot.

She picked through three packages of buns to find ones that weren’t dented and had the shapeliest form. Then she scooped out some bread from inside the top buns so they would rest snugly on the burgers, not teeter on top like a mushroom cap. Rather than spreading mayo on the bun before building the burgers, she used a pipette to add tiny mayo dollops to the nearly finished dish, allowing her to position the creamy condiment exactly how she wanted and in just the right amounts.

“That way, when you look at it, it’s like, ‘Oooh, I can just grab this thing and bite into it.’ That’s what we want,” she said.

But even when the food stylist and photographer are happy, the images still need approval from the client, whether that’s cookbook art directors, magazine editors or food company marketing leadership. The clients may ask for tweaks – less tomato, more pickled onion – so it can take a while before everyone involved in the shoot feels the photos look their absolute best.

For a cookbook shoot, Kelty can often bang out as many as 10 shots over the course of a day, depending on the kind of food involved. The two exacting shots of the Atlantic Sea Farms burgers, though, took six hours to complete.

Kelty said the working relationship between a food stylist and photographer is symbiotic.

“I always tell people I speak food, and the photographer speaks light,” she said. “We depend on each other. You can be the greatest food stylist, and if you have somebody who’s not good with the light, it’s not going to show off your work.”

COMPOSITION, LIGHTING AND THE MAGIC OF POST-EDITING 

Portland-based food photographer Evan Kalman has worked for clients such as Domino magazine, Ghirardelli, Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative, Simple Mills and Wolf Gourmet. He said good food photography depends on balanced composition, artful lighting and post-processing with photo-editing software.

The composition, or where the elements of the photo are placed within the frame, “is what gives it that visual strikingness, with leading lines that make your eye move around the picture so you can see the story the photographer is trying to tell,” he said.

To explain the concept of leading lines, Kalman used the example of a photo where apples are the subject. The photo team can place some silverware on the side of the frame pointing toward the apples, or arrange a burlap cloth so the edge leads to the fruit. “Your eye is going to naturally take that as a line across the entire image and follow it, and you’ll hit the apples,” he said.

“Lighting helps set the mood and accentuates things and gives a more dynamic look,” said Kalman, who may aim for a moody, intense atmosphere when he shoots a winter recipe, or bright and airy for a summery dish.

Post-editing is as important as what happens on the set, Kalman said. “It helps things pop visually and gives the shot a kind of richness that I don’t think is quite as achievable with a simple snap of a camera.”

Kalman said green vegetables often come out looking more yellow in a photo than they are in real life, regardless of lighting. So in post-editing, he can boost the green hues to make the ingredient look more true to life. He can also add color saturation, making lemons look more intensely yellow, for instance.

“We’re able to selectively manipulate the colors to more accurately or more artistically drive a point home,” he said.

Kalman spends anywhere from 15 minutes to more than 2 hours on post-editing a single image. Some clients want a more casual, realistic shot, so the edits won’t take long.

“Other times, like when I did something for RXBARs, they wanted it to look perfectly perfect, so all unnecessary shadows and reflections had to be removed,” he said. “And the wrapper of the power bar needed to be recreated in Photoshop so we would have perfect lines and weren’t seeing wrinkles and divots in the bar.”

TRICKS OF THE TRADE

Some decades ago, food styling often involved a fair amount of trickery, particularly in shoots for big corporate advertising. Stories abound of red lipstick being painted on strawberries and mashed potatoes standing in for ice cream so it wouldn’t melt under hot set lights.

Far less “cheating” takes places at today’s food shoots, in part because of truth-in-advertising legal restrictions, and also because food magazines and cookbooks have trended toward a more natural look. Moreover, modern consumers have a more sophisticated feel for what food should look like, due largely to their own social media food posts and viewing.

Still, stylists reserve the right to use handy tricks when necessary. Like with ice cream, the ingredient that all sources for this story agreed is the hardest to shoot because it “dies” (melts and has to be replaced) so quickly on set.

“Ice cream takes a lot of talent,” said Lambeth, whose clients include Bon Appetit, Dunkin’, Food & Wine, SharkNinja and Wawa. “It’s very challenging. You have to make sure it’s at the right temperature, that it has the right texture. If it has anything inside it, you have to make sure those pieces are included in a way that looks natural.”

In a shoot where ice cream isn’t the hero – but a dish meant to add atmosphere as part of a larger table shot – Lambeth said you can use a stand-in without being unethical. In those instances, she likes to mix a can of prepared cake icing with confectioners’ sugar to thicken it to the right consistency, then add food coloring to get the correct hue.

Kelty said whole roasted chicken and turkey also die quickly on set: Before long, their skins become irredeemably shriveled. Besides, roasting a big bird on set could keep the shoot team waiting for hours.

So Kelty does was she calls her “40-minute turkey.” She roasts the bird for under an hour to adequately plump and firm the flesh, then brushes or sprays a browning agent like Kitchen Bouquet on the skin to make it evenly golden brown.

Lambeth uses Kitchen Bouquet to brown other items as well. “If I need the edge of a bun to be a little bit darker, I might take a tiny little paintbrush and paint it with some so it has a hint of toastiness,” she said.

Though they usually say their favorite tools are their hands, food stylists also put tweezers to use when they need to position smaller components in precise spots. They use small paint brushes to coat meat with oil so it looks extra-moist, or to create little pools of juice on a meat plate or of vinaigrette on a salad plate.

They use heat guns for custom browning, and small steamers to keep pizza cheese optimally gooey once it’s out of the oven. Because ingredients like avocado and apple will brown soon after they’re sliced, stylists often brush a little lemon juice or other acidic liquid on the cut surfaces to slow the oxidization, a common trick for home cooks, too.

ROLLING WITH THE PUNCHES

Yet regardless of their efforts to make everything perfect, food stylists inevitably face potential disasters on set from time to time. Part of the challenge is that their workplace can change from job to job, even from day to day.

“You could be a week with a client, and one day you’re on this location, the next day you’re in the studio and the next day you’re on another location,” said Lambeth. “You really have to be able to problem-solve and think quickly on your feet.”

Lambeth recalled working some years ago as a stylist assistant on a New York City shoot where circumstances were far less than ideal. “The set was so small, and what we were making ended up creating a lot of smoke. So I had to cook in a Chelsea alleyway – complete with rats – making quesadillas and burgers on an induction burner for a nine-hour shoot.”

Kelty once worked on a magazine shoot at a rented house along the Potomac in Washington, D.C. But the house didn’t have electricity. She had to cook over open flames in a fire pit. She said she was grateful that her husband, Philippe, had accompanied her on the shoot, because he was able to at least jerry-rig a grill rack for her to cook on.

“I remember assisting a stylist once who dropped a pie that we needed to photograph, and it was the only one that we had,” Jarnes said. “I had no idea how she was going to pull it off. But she was able to pick it up, take a deep breath, and push it back into place where it needed to be. And it was totally fine. That attitude of just rolling with the punches, expecting the unexpected and being confident things will be OK, was really impactful for me. ”

“In our industry, you have to show up and be vulnerable, to be the best version of yourself,” Kelty said. “Sometimes it’s hard, but 99 percent of the time, it is rewarding. That is the creative process.”

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