PICTURING FOOD

A Profile of Ojai Photographer, Victoria Pearson

By Jane Handel

When Victoria Pearson looks at food (and just about everything else), whether it is a single orange, a wedge of cheese on a plate or an entire meal spread out on a dining table, her gaze encompasses many elements at once. Like all of us, her immediate impression is of shapes, colors and textures. But as an artist, Pearson also bears witness to the overall design of the composition; she observes the way each element plays off the others. In particular, she scrutinizes how the light caresses each object and how the shadows fall. Then, at the precise moment when the light successfully vivifies her subject, quietly and without any fanfare, she looks through her camera's lens and clicks the shutter. Watching Victoria Pearson work is like watching a Zen monk rake leaves-she is in the moment.

Photography is in Pearson's blood. As a child, she received a Brownie box camera from her father, who was a camera buff and amateur photographer. Continuing in this role of mentor, and because the incipient artist showed an interest and aptitude, when she was in her mid-teens, he gave her a 35-millimeter camera. Pearson was sufficiently inspired by this new tool's potential to have her own darkroom in high school. She went on to study her chosen medium in junior college and then further perfected her skills at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. From there, Pearson developed a very successful career as a fashion and celebrity photographer.
But a major shift in both her career and her thinking occurred when Conde Nast Traveler magazine entered the world with its atypical take on travel photography-a take that was as much about lifestyles and aesthetics as it was about photographs of exotic scenery. Pearson was hired to help facilitate this new approach to travel photography. About the same time, Martha Stewart Living came into being and also hired her. These venues opened up a new world to Pearson and allowed her to develop her own distinctive and creative approach to photographing still lifes, landscapes and food. Martha Stewart was also a source of inspiration philosophically-especially in how Pearson began to understand the ways in which banal, everyday rituals and objects contribute to a rich and nuanced life.

Now, with multiple cook-books added to her extensive resume, including a new one on cheese and wine that she has just finished shooting in her Ojai studio for Chronicle Books, picturing food is one of the things Pearson enjoys most. She feels that cooking is a very similar process to that of photography. The same method of using a machine or technology and chemicals to create is involved, and to the extent that one becomes familiar with those elements, at one with the technology, it is possible to allow one's intuition free rein. As in alchemy, elements are taken from nature and are then manipulated by the hand of a person to create something special. She cites Julia Child as an inspiring example of someone who was so comfortable with what she was doing in the kitchen, so intimately familiar with her tools and the ingredients at hand, that she blurred the line between technique, craft and artistry. Child demystified the process of cooking for millions of people with her casual, relaxed approach.

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It's always difficult to define or articulate a visual artist's style, and artists are often in the process of reinventing themselves so they remain somewhat elusive. Victoria Pearson has worked in so many areas-fashion, portraiture, travel, food-and each area has its own aspect or quality that informs her eye. Her favorite photographer, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, is renowned for his spontaneous and joyous snapshot documents of family and friends at play and in repose. And like Lartigue, she has a deep appreciation of and curiosity about life and people. But Pearson is also clearly influenced by a modernist design aesthetic, one that is organic yet sleek and elegant. Some of her still lifes have a formal minimalism that has a long art-historical context. Rembrandt or Cezanne might just as easily have inspired them as Irving Penn or Josef Sudek. But how does one describe that inimitable luminosity her photographs have, or the obvious rapport she has with her subject, or the way she inspires us to look through her eyes with the same loving appreciation at a simple avocado or glass of water? Unapologetically and unabashedly, Victoria Pearson makes beautiful pictures.

In a preface to a book on the extraordinary photographs of fruits, vegetables and flowers that were the life's work of 19th Century British photographer Charles Jones, Alice Waters wrote: "May those of us who feast on these photographs be inspired to try and make such a bounty of good things, and such reverence for their beauty, an unalienable part of everyone's life." One might equally apply that sentiment to Victoria Pearson's photographs. They serve as reminders that there is beauty all around us-in the humblest of objects, the simplest of pleasures. It is the everyday ritual of the morning cup of coffee, the sharing of food that has been prepared with love and a profound reverence for nature that most inform her life and work. What Pearson sees, and what many of her photographs help us to see, is the beauty of the everyday, the commonplace and the banal-those things that we so easily take for granted but are, in their essence, imbued with specialness if we take the time to look.

I'm happy to report that my 12-year-old daughter, Eva, is at the age where she's begun devouring books at an amazing rate. She can now be found reading at breakfast, in the bathroom or under the covers with a little clip-on book light. She seems to enjoy young adult selections, or YA as the genre is known to those in the know. Titles like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, True Confessions of a Heartless Girl or, most recently, City of the Beasts, the first young adult novel by the heartbreaking Chilean novelist Isabel Allende.

I enjoy keeping track of Eva's selections and was pleasantly surprised to find her engrossed in Julia Child's final book, My Life in France, which I haven't yet read myself. Upon gentle interrogation, Eva told me that she found it shocking to discover that Ms. Child didn't know what a shallot was until age 36. Of course, in the days before food television, one didn't have the dubious advantage of a daily informational food media barrage from Emeril Lagasse, Alton Brown, Bobby Flay, Mario Batalli, Tyler Florence, et al. Like it or not, we now live in a country where, courtesy of the Food Network, 4-year-olds scream "Bam!" while putting salt on their scrambled eggs and sixth-graders debate the merits of extra virgin olive oil (which is always, always abbreviated to EVOO by near fanatical Rachael Ray devotees).

While the end product of this supercharged culinary media exposure should be greater numbers of people inspired to cook and eat together, I'm not convinced this is really the case. Lately, when traveling around the country, I've started taking an informal survey; oddly, I've found that the same people who complain of not having enough time to cook dinner somehow find time to watch one or more hours of the Food Network each night. This may not be as paradoxical as it appears. According to a 2006 Harvard-based project on working families and globalization, the number of children under 15 raised in households where both parents work outside the home has skyrocketed. And with no one puttering about the kitchen with a hot meal ready when the family gets home from a rough day, it's understandable that the warmth and companionship of a favorite TV cook might help fill the nurturing void while sitting on the couch eating takeout.

As a kid I was lucky. My own Southern mother made a killer gumbo, the best pecan pie ever and insisted on teaching me the fundamentals of cooking early on. My sisters and I each prepared meals when called upon to do so, and I soon found myself watching cooking shows, especially Julia Child and Graham Kerr, The Galloping Gourmet. Because Kerr appeared in the late morning, I actually stayed home sick more than once to watch him tackle a particularly challenging dish. To me he was cooler than James Bond: glass of red wine in one hand and a balloon whisk in the other. (I probably don't have to tell you I was a weird 10-year-old). While Kerr thrilled, Julia Child appealed to me on a deeper level. Like most of America, I cannot remember a time when she wasn't part of my consciousness. Her books remain those most used in my library, and her playful balance of mischievousness and seriousness in the kitchen is something for which I strive. She was honest about her opinions and unashamed of her mistakes. Her famously warbling voice is still as comforting as that of my grandmother's.

A few years before Julia's death, I got a call from my friend Betty Marvin. Although younger, Betty has much in common with Julia. She towers over most men (in more ways than one), has lived off and on in various exotic locales and has had a collection of diverse careers including chef, restaurateur, opera singer, and is a well respected fine artist and published author. In the '50s, while married to actor Lee Marvin, she brought the first haute couture studio to Rodeo Drive. No sissy, Betty could out-shoot and out-fish most of Lee's gang, even hauling in the winning marlin one year at Cabo. I like to think of her as my personal Auntie Mame with the same famous admonition of "Live, live, live!" Betty's Santa Barbara dinner parties are a local legend, and she and Julia were close friends, cooking and dining together often. So when Betty asked if Perla, Eva and I were free to have dinner with Julia that night, I was fairly certain it wasn't a prank. We were to be there by 7 and bring an appetizer. I hung up and looked at the time. It was nearly 5, and on a Sunday it would take about an hour to get to Santa Barbara from Ojai. That meant I had one hour to conceptualize and prepare an appetizer for the most important culinary icon of my lifetime.

At this point it is helpful to remember that most restaurant chefs are big babies when it comes to whipping something up without advance preparation. The most uttered term in a professional kitchen, even where no French is spoken and no French dishes prepared, is Mise en Place, meaning roughly, "setting in place" or "to put in place". This is why those lamb lollipops with wild morel demi-glace and Israeli couscous that take you six hours to prepare at home come out 25 minutes after your waiter takes the order (if you're lucky). This is because the lamb racks have already been frenched, trimmed and marinated; the mirepoix chopped; bones browned off; stock simmered and skimmed and reduced to a velvety syrup, etc. With the sauce, garnishes, accompanying starch and veggies all prepped and ready to fly, the mise en place for this dish is now complete and all the chef has left to do is cook the lamb to the proper temp and try not to get fingerprints on the plate. In my opinion, this is one of the reasons why so many home cooks are organizationally and creatively superior to so-called professionals. Home cooks must start each dish from scratch and there's obviously no way they can get away with cooking the same menu night after night. Lucky for me, my last restaurant gig was years ago.

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For those who haven't yet had the pleasure of an introduction, the geoduck is a burrowing sea clam that can weigh as much as a medium-sized dog and live longer than a human. Its most impressive feature, however, is that most of this clam resides proudly outside of its shell. As for its appearance, I've heard it variously compared to a diminutive elephant trunk, a prodigious phallus or a prop from the X-Files-kind of a bivalve Rorschach test; people tend to see in it what they want. Once a lowly chowder clam, this shy mollusk languished in relative obscurity until, along with Don Johnson and Madonna, it gained sudden and inexplicable popularity in the mid-'80s. At one point, prices rose as high as $30 a pound, mostly due to demand from Asia for its crunchy texture, nutty flavor and, of course, its purported aphrodisiacal properties. Although Uncle Miltie, as I'd come to call my clam, had been exhibited a day earlier at Eva's school (where I'm told the teacher blushed), to me it still seemed, well, surprisingly frisky. I made a snap decision to whip out a batch of thin, cornmeal crust geoduck pizzettas. With time screaming by now, I proofed some yeast (always a good idea when the package is stale dated) and started a batch of basic cornmeal pizza dough. My plan: Let the dough rise on the ride to Santa Barbara; present Uncle Miltie to Julia, and then head to the kitchen to finish baking off the pizzas to be topped with razor thin, olive oil-poached slices of geoduck and garlic with Argentine chili flakes and thyme sprigs from our garden. It very nearly went as planned.

When Perla, Eva and I arrived at Betty's dinner party we were expecting to see at least a dozen other people. Instead we were thrilled to find no other guests at all - just Betty, Julia and Julia's companion. As we entered the room, I thought for a moment how odd a sensation it was to meet for the first time someone I felt I'd known my entire life. In person, Julia was even taller than I was expecting, and I remembered for a moment an article I had once read saying that because of her stature, in school plays she was never cast as a princess, instead playing an emperor or sometimes a lioness. I savored the image of Julia Child as a lioness. As we drank a first glass of champagne, I reached into my bag and began to ready my heroic bivalve for presentation while explaining that I had the good fortune to acquire a fresh geoduck from a friend. Julia shrieked with laughter and said, "My goodness, have you ever seen one of those things when they're alive? It'll really make you want to throw up!" Needless to say, I immediately jettisoned the idea of presenting the live clam prior to serving. Instead, I excused myself, made a dash for the kitchen, assembled the pizzas and returned with a small one for each of us. I believe I really did hold my breath as she took the first bite. After the geoduck pizza was graciously pronounced delicious, we moved to the dining room for dinner. Julia insisted Eva sit beside her. Throughout the evening as we discussed Julia's favorite burger (In-N-Out), her favorite local Mexican food (La Super Rica) and her favorite local cook (Betty), Julia would intermittently reach over to affectionately tickle Eva's stomach or caress her head. We discussed travel, music and, of course, food and more food, and I was struck by how deeply interested she was in the opinions of others. For me, that night was truly magical.

Over the next few years, I was fortunate to meet Julia twice more, both times at Betty Marvin's house. Even as Julia's health began to wane, her presence remained commanding and her humor unbroken. Two weeks after Julia Child's death at 91, Betty invited us to a celebration meal in memory of her dear friend. We ate roasted salmon and drank champagne in the garden while Betty told us more stories about this remarkable woman. I remembered then that last time I saw Julia, sitting contentedly while she studied our gathering with certain amusement, an elderly lioness watching the pride.

Morning has broken and the first hint of the summer sun is just beginning to light the skies behind the hills in the Upper Ojai Valley. It is the end of June as I write this and the day is quiet and still. The only sounds are the sweet chirps and harmonious songs of our resident songbirds celebrating a new day. The air feels cool and clean, and I move slowly and breathe deeply as I don my well-worn straw hat, gather my simple tools of the trade (a Japanese sickle and a large bag of rubber bands) and head toward the gracefully curving rows of lavender that stretch out and embrace our rural home.

From late June to mid-September, Bill and I begin our days on New Oak Ranch harvesting lavender. It's a straightforward but labor-intensive job, performed as it has been for many generations, by hand. Historically, lavender has been used as an herbal remedy, a seductive perfume or both. References to its use have been discovered in the remains of ancient Egypt, Greece and the Roman Empire. Today, we are a part of an increasing number of family farmers around the world growing this versatile crop. Celebrated lavender gardens are found not only in France, Italy and England, but also in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Bulgaria, Croatia and, of course, the United States.

This morning, as every morning, my first step is to build a bracelet of rubber bands on my left wrist. Then, with my wrist wrapped in pale beige, I bend over and gather a generous handful of lavender stems and, with a swift and clean sweep of my serrated-edge sickle, I have a beautiful spray of lavender. Quickly, I bind the spray together with a "slip and twist" of a rubber band. Circumnavigating the lavender bush, I cut and bind and soon the plant is shaved of its long-stemmed blossoms and I have accumulated a small pile of fragrant lavender bunches. I proceed down the row… bend, gather, cut and twist… bend, gather, cut and twist.

I savor the cool peace, my quiet rhythm, the beauty and the solitude of these early mornings. My lavender-field companions, the honeybees, ignore my presence as they remain at rest, still clinging to their floral nocturnal resting place. As I move on, I concentrate on my task and on the beauty of our lavender field: the rich violet flowers topping long, graceful stems, the gently rounded gray-green bushes and the seemingly endless purple-hazed rows that stretch into the distance. In the early morning, the lavender aroma is mild, but as the sun rises and the air grows warmer, the lavender oils are released and the scent becomes enthrallingly more intense. And as the day gets hotter, the honeybees become more active, but they're focused on their job of making honey and they ignore me as I go about my task.

Once cut, we load the lavender bunches onto the small green trailer that trundles behind our little John Deere and haul them to our dark, well-ventilated drying room where they are hung upside down to dry. Thanks to Ojai's hot, arid summer days, our bunches dry in just a few days, ready for use as full stems in stunning, long-lasting bouquets or as flower buds, stripped from the stems, for use in aromatic sachets or taste-tantalizing lavender recipes.

Separating the buds from the stem is a rustic yet wonderfully aromatic procedure. It's like working in lavender heaven for anyone who does not mind standing over a large plastic trash bin and bunch by bunch, rubbing the flower heads together to release the buds. Unfortunately, this rubbing process results in a lot of broken stems and lavender leaves mixed in with the buds. The next step is sifting, sifting not once or twice but three times, using various sized screens to remove unwanted debris. Sifting also allows for visual inspection to make sure that the lavender sachet sold at New Oak Ranch includes only the best of the lavender.

We do not harvest all of the lavender on New Oak Ranch. We save some of the pleasure for our guests, who visit on U-pick weekends during the lavender season. Admission is free and, for $5 a bunch, visitors can pick their own lavender, choosing from our four major varieties: Grosso (long and showy flowers with a robust aroma), Provence (milder in aroma and sweeter in flavor-a great addition to your kitchen herb collection), Buena Vista (bright purple flowers that cling to the stem long after it has dried) and Hidcote (deliciously edible with small dark purple flowers that make a beautiful garnish). New Oak Ranch is a beautiful place to visit, to slow down and feel the country air, to snap a photo and to enjoy a picnic lunch under a sprawling walnut tree.

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And our Ojai lavender growers group is expanding. Crystal and Larry Rogero of Frog Creek Farm are relative newcomers to the lavender business... to the challenges and to the rewards of growing this incredible crop. Each of us appreciates living in a place where people are willing to share their knowledge, their experience and their equipment. For example, both the Messoris and the Donoghues own a still, an expensive apparatus required to separate essential oil from the plant material. In true Ojai community fashion, they both offer the use of their equipment to growers like us.

So create and nurture your lavender dream. Incorporate lavender into your garden, enjoy lavender aromatherapy, use lavender in a favorite recipe, visit us at New Oak Ranch for U-pick lavender (call or check our website for hours), check out the Messoris at the Ojai Sunday farmers' market, or call any one of us for product information or to arrange a tour. Contact information is listed below.

HINTS FOR GROWING LAVENDER

Most varieties of lavender are drought-tolerant, hailing from the rocky, hot and dry regions of the Mediterranean, so plant your lavender in a hot and sunny location and in well-drained soil.

Generally, lavender prefers a more neutral to alkaline soil and requires little or no fertilizer.

Once established, lavender needs little irrigation and what water it receives should be provided at the base of the plant (use drip lines) to prevent the growth of fungus. Bottom line, lavender does not like "wet feet." Too much water causes root rot and will kill the plant. Plan accordingly when using lavender in mixed landscapes.

LAVENDER FOR HEALTH AND BEAUTY

Use Lavender Oil (the valuable concentrated essence of fragrant oil obtained by distillation) to relieve pain and/or itch from burns and insect bites, relieve congestion, to help heal cuts and grazes, in a relaxing massage or bath. Lavender oil is a key ingredient in many soaps, lotions, bath salts, etc.

Use Lavender Hydrosol (the condensed steam that is a by-product of the distillation process) as a refreshing mist on the face or body, a pleasant insect repellent, an ironing spray to scent linens, a sleep-enhancing pillow spray, a room refresher, for relief from sunburn and as a hot flash coolant.

Use Lavender Sachet (the aromatic buds of the lavender flower) as an insect repellent in closets, in potpourris for beauty and scent, in a dryer bag to scent clothes as they tumble dry, in a sachet bag tucked under your pillow to encourage sleep and relaxation or in the car to reduce stress.

LAVENDER IN FOOD

Lavender is quickly becoming "the new taste" in American cuisine. Long a part of the traditional "herbes de Provence" compound used in French fare, lavender now stands alone as a complimentary flavor for meat, seafood, eggs, salads, veggies, citrus and other fruits. Experiment by substituting lavender for rosemary in your favorite recipes. Just be sure to use a variety grown for culinary purposes, and go light-too much lavender can overwhelm other flavors.