Photography by Jessica Turner
Kelsey Foster knew what she wanted to do from a young age and never changed her mind.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in photography from University of North Texas and then moved to New York City to pursue a dream of becoming a fashion photographer.
Photo-assisting gigs — one in fashion photography and one for a shooter specializing in food, lifestyle and fashion — were plentiful until they dried up with the great recession, and Foster returned to Dallas in 2009.
Since then, she’s become the go-to food photographer for publications like Texas Monthly and D. And her list of commercial clients includes Pie Five Pizza, 7-Up, Mr. & Mrs. T’s mixers, Central Market, Jameson Irish whiskey and Frito-Lay.
Foster, who lives in Hampton Hills, moved her studio out of a rented space on Jefferson Boulevard last year and bought a 3,400-square-foot building on Beatrice Street in West Dallas, where she shares studio space with florist Kate McLeod.
She connected with former classmates working in Dallas ad agencies.
I knew a lot of junior-level art directors from UNT. One kept asking me to shoot concept work for her agency. Concept work is preliminary photos that are used to pitch a job to a client. An agency will have three ideas, and they’ll execute them roughly to present to a client and hope they accept one of them. So I kept doing that for a paycheck and just because it was fun, and a lot of it was food related.
A piece of bacon was a turning point in her career.
I kept getting hired for concept work, but they kept not picking me for the real job. There was one where it was between me and another photographer who had 35 years of experience, and they picked him. But then they spent the whole day trying to replicate my concept shot, and he couldn’t do it. They said, “why can’t you do it like this?” And he was like, “Because you should’ve hired Kelsey.” That was the beginning of people who were a little older in the industry trusting me.
Soon she found a footing.
The more I worked with that group of people in Dallas — art directors and photo stylists — the more I loved it. It’s still fashion in a way because you’re still dressing something up to make it look beautiful. It’s not a model in a couture dress, but it could be a burger with beautiful garnishes and it’s still making something really pretty.
City of opportunity
Dallas has a lot of ad agencies with a lot of food clients. And then marketing directors at companies hop around a lot. So for example, the person from Pie Five Pizza moved to Bonchon Chicken, so she got me in with Bonchon because she knew me, and we had that relationship.
Relationships matter as much as talent.
If an art director has a relationship with you and they think the day is going to be productive but also fun, sometimes the work relationship decides who gets picked. People skills and making people feel comfortable is important.
Collaboration is her life.
I love working with art directors. I love working with food stylists. I love the whole team, because each person is good at what they do, and when there’s mutual trust, you know that what you create is going to be good. To watch someone else’s vision coming to life is really rewarding.
It also helps that she loves food.
In Brooklyn, I was flat broke and had no money, but there would be so much food leftover from these shoots, and I would carry all these groceries home. I hate wasting food, so now I try to donate it or give it to my friends or leave it on people’s porches.
Achieving financing to buy a commercial building was no piece of cake.
A lot of bankers don’t understand artists. When you’re freelance, you don’t have a set income coming in every month. I’ve been doing it 13 years, so I’m not as stressed out about it as I was in the beginning. A lot of bankers will look at that and go, “you made a lot of money here, but you didn’t make anything this one month,” and that’s all they see. It doesn’t compute for them. I had to go to three or four bankers before I found one who understood my business plan. Karl Sanford from Manhattan Project is a good friend, and he helped me with my business plan.
Designing her own studio was a dream come true.
I’ve rented so many studios in the past that I knew what I liked and didn’t like. Because it was a blank slate, I got to do whatever I wanted. Knowing so many people in the food business, I had help designing the kitchen.
Food photography nowadays is very organic compared to the shellacked hamburger buns of 1980s magazine ads — but Foster does have a few tricks up her sleeve.
My favorite trick is teriyaki or stir-fry sauce. If you have a beautiful shot of a whole turkey, and you need really brown skin, that turkey is definitely raw on the inside. They’ll use a blowtorch or a Searzall torch and then use teriyaki sauce and almost paint with it. It’s like painting but with food.
