La Figa at SEAF
The La Figa: Visions of Food and Form installation at the 2009 Seattle Erotic Art Festival, was fantastic! It featured live performances where Tiberio created over a dozen new compositions with live models and edible ingredients; eight large format prints on 30 feet of wall space; and two video screens featuring ongoing slideshows of more of our images and behind the scenes "making of" shots.
Matt's photographs from the event, as well as a video of our installation from NWLive.tv are both available on our blog.
The images on this page are a tiny sampling from La Figa: Visions of Food and Form, an upcoming coffee table book. This is a book about natural beauty and fresh flavors. It is a book about our human connection with the food that we eat. It is a book about how fresh food brings our senses to life and can tune us in to our most primal instincts for flavor and pleasure. Exploring a single ingredient at a time in words and images, La Figa is an examination of the relationship between food, sensuality, and the ingredients that make life delicious.
Born in Italy, Tiberio Simone is a James Beard award winning chef whose vision drives this project. He works with photographer Matt Freedman to create the exquisite images you see here. Each photograph captures an ephemeral work of art that Tiberio creates with a common food ingredient and the human body. Tiberio has also teamed up with Alyssa Royse to bring the images to life with stories from his remarkably colorful life, as well as extensive text about the ingredients. Alyssa is an award winning writer and journalist whose work has appeared in newspapers and magazines across the country
Be sure to check out our blog for the latest behind-the-scenes "making of" La Figa photos.
Excerpt from La Figa: Visions of Food and Form
Strawberry
When I was a pastry chef at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel in Seattle, I was able to really explore my creative side and discover how versatile and delicious (and sensual) food could be. I used to love going to work early or staying late just to create art with chocolate, fruit and pastry. I would experiment with ways to express my love and passion through food – hoping that it would inspire love and passion in those who ate it!
In those days, it was my job to create special daily desserts for the restaurants in the hotel (an extraordinary hotel had to have extraordinary desserts to match). Every day I had to come up with a new idea, something that no one had seen before. I remember one summer day, I was presented with some absolutely gorgeous local strawberries which were my muse to create something new for the day. Believe me when I tell you that a beautiful berry is every bit as inspiring as a beautiful woman! Chef Kerry Sears had a great connection with a local organic farm, always getting great fruits and vegetables. But on this day, it was a case of richly red strawberries, so fresh they still had the dirt on them and their flesh was still warm from the summer sun. They were tiny and dark red, one bite of it was like a sweet wet yummy kiss – nirvana! They were so perfect that I really didn’t want to do anything to them. Let this be a lesson to all of us, that natural and fresh is always better, with fruit and with people! Anyway, I had this crazy idea to make a wine reduction with honey to drizzle on the berries, but it did not quite work, it was way too sweet and competed with the berries. Then a bottle of balsamic vinegar of Modena caught my eye and I decided to try the reduction again, but this time with vinegar instead of wine, and only half the honey. I was amazed at the result! The flavor was not too sweet and had plenty of acidity to show off the sweetness of the berry. But something was missing, some sort of spice. I tried everything I had in the pastry shop but nothing was working right, at least it was not perfect enough for these berries or my fantasy expectations. So I decided, “what the hell,” and just added some fresh cracked black pepper as a last ridiculous try. Guess what? It was perfect! Unfortunately I could not use it that day, it was too simple for such a fancy place. But I knew that I had stumbled into one of those great romances, it was a perfect combination, even if it didn’t look like it. To this day, when I serve strawberry and good balsamic vinegar, I can see the slow smile of satisfaction spread across the faces of my guests, they moan quietly and I know they understand the profound beauty of a simply perfect pairing. So, here are some other pictures from the photo shoot that Matt and I did with strawberries and our yummy friend Alyssa. When people look at the pictures in the book, they think that it is chocolate on her body, but it isn’t, it’s a balsamic reduction. These photos are very special to me for a lot of reasons. The strawberries with Alyssa were really our first photo shoot for this book. I asked her what ingredient she would be if she could come back in another life as a food instead of a person. She said strawberry because everyone loves strawberries! At that time, we did not have a studio to do our work. So, we did the shoot in my house on my kitchen table. Something about that was so lovely, because my kitchen is a place where my friends gather, and I love to cook for them and serve them, there is so much love in a kitchen. That shoot was quite a challenge, especially for the model to stay still and be patient as I applied the strawberries. It was very tricky, the strawberries were sliced so thin, and their juice made them so very slick and slippery, they kept sliding off her body. But her skin was so beautiful, so pale, I just wanted to continue and find different ways to apply the strawberries. I also really wanted to work the balsamic into the photos, because it is such a signature dish for me. The result was fantastic - I called it my lady bug. And I will tell you this, that girl is incredibly ticklish. I think she giggled every time I put a drop of balsamic on her. Really, that made it even better, so if you can find a way to make people giggle when you serve them strawberries with a balsamic reduction, you’ll know you’ve done something truly special!
