Food and cooking serve as metaphors for life and love. Each plays a huge role in the way I see and photograph the world. I seek to nourish both eye and soul with my photography, in much the same way I feed bodies through my cooking. The work of food photographer Penny de los Santos inspires me, as she conveys the luminous beauty and harsh reality of food through her work.
Photographs of the cooking process usually take the form of still-life, a tradition deeply ingrained in the Western mind – think of the superb paintings of Dutch artists like Pieter Aertsen and Willem Kalf in the 16th and 17th centuries. Les Rêves de Julia – using digitally captured and composited photographs printed on common photographic paper – attempts to portray the rigid culinary traditions of classic French cuisine.
Based on iconic chef Julia Child’s instructions for Boeuf à la Bourguignonne from Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), Les Rêves de Julia deconstructs that recipe through a series of images representing key steps in the cooking process, evoking memories and longings at the same time.
(There are several images in this series, my final project for a class taught by Hans Gindlesberger at Virginia Tech. Note again that the project DECONSTRUCTS the recipe. The images in the composites come from my last two trips to France.)
© 2013 C. Bertelsen
CYNTHIA D. BERTELSEN 
Lovely, thoughtful photos. Thanks for sharing.
this is so beautiful.