Ginger snap
Q nake-hipped Melvyn Buns shoots food. L.3Other smart photographers take faces, fashion or wars but Melvyn is one of a new breed. After hours of careful thought, he flexes his powerful shoulders and gives a toasted teacake 64 ASA.
The name of Melvyn Buns is every- where: ad agencies, book publishers and colour-sup suppers, because he always takes such Care. With the right make-up and lighting he can turn the shy sausage- next-door into a' glistening roll-me-over sizzler.
Once upon a time the most readable cookery books had chic little line drawings to whet the appetite. The nicest ones still do. A healthy potato (Mr Murphy) is a fine figure of a vegetable. Edward Bawden captured its texture beautifully in his rough brown paper cover for Good Potato Dishes by Ambrose Heath.
Today the greedy have no mind's eye. They need colour photography instead, to devour polar-scape sorbets, arty-chokes, come-on-in sauces: the curves, angles, textures, foreground, middle-ground and horizon of the glorious landscape of food.
Melvyn's West End studio is cleverly converted from an old mews. There are the usual Blow-Up empty spaces plus a kitchen to one side. The caverns are haunted by a silent assistant who wears track-shoes. He changes the music tapes, makes instant coffee in ringed mugs and warms try-out polaroid prints to life between his big adolescent. hands. When he is not doing these things, he hangs about.
To photograph a Battenberg cake one dusty morning in August takes a great many people. There is Melvyn in a mata- dor frame of mind and his assistant. There is the art director who gave the visual brief. (Should the Battenberg cake be perceived as NOBLE, sensu-oo-al or nostalgic in a little doily daydream?) Next there is the words man who was right to press for a Rupert Brooke on this one (`And is there Battenberg still for tea?'). Then there is the sweet-natured home economist who made the cake. Tenderly she spread it with apricot jam and fitted its marzipan garment about it. Like a dresser calmly robing a great singer she knew that Battenberg was going out there to perform. Last and very far from least is Iris the stylist who chose the plate the cake is lying on and who knows how to place an old silver knife beside it — just — like — that. Already this snap-to-it creative team have been working for three hours to get the shot but still it is not quite right. Take a break. So they take a break and all walk lithely round.
Melvyn's studio is a theatre store of props because food is drama. There is an old black-leaded range which can be back- lit in red to give a farmhouse glow to flour refiners' scones. These were the good old Hovis days on the land when farm labour- ers did not have toothache, arthritis or dead babies. Here is a lump of beautifully watered turf which is lit with sunshiney brightness and a golden hamper for a picnic scene. There is even a wind machine for blowing thin silk curtains romantically behind a wedding buffet extravaganza. (A lovely picture, wasted really on magazines like Leisure Freezer.)
Melvyn is helped in all this artifice by Iris the famous stylist. She zips across town in her little car and knows a vast network of people with objects she can beg, borrow or hire. She is paid £80 a day for her delicate touches which mean so much. Suddenly she is in Chelsea loading little boxes of cow creamers for a silver gilt double-dare-you double cream promotion. Next day she gives the insurers a bell, takes out whop- ping cover and collects a parcel of fine Mogul miniatures to tart up step-by-step poppadoms. You've got to be careful with India though. Melvyn fixes the lighting and suddenly the picture says Bombay Taj rather than Kentish Town Tandoori.
In Kentish Town is a blethering old man too mad to get his clacking dentures fixed. He is a great connoisseur of Melvyn's art, the glorious coloured food pictures on hoardings and luxury cake boxes. Melvyn's last great picture was called The Swiss Roll. The old man saw it but didn't think much of it. When he opened the box the Swiss roll was smaller and meaner than he expected, just like meeting a famous per- son in the flesh.
And lighting is the problem with this Battenberg today. Up and down simmers the lighting from amber• to yellow to afternoon brilliance. Remembrance of tea past should be just a touch honey- coloured. Grantchester, May 1912, teatime. Lights, camera, Melvyn's got it at last and, yummy, it's good. Evelyn Daube
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