The Seattle Times: Eastside News: Picture-perfect food is her mission

Food stylist JoAnne Naganawa primps a cup of "ice cream" — really powdered sugar mixed with canned frosting — for a photo shoot recently at Iridio studios in Seattle. In her career, Naganawa has worked on many magazine, cookbook and advertising shoots.

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JoAnne Naganawa stirs up a lot of good dishes as she develops and tests recipes for cookbooks, but she is better-known in the Northwest for her ability to make you salivate even before you read the recipe.

Naganawa is the food stylist behind hundreds of food photographs.

The Bellevue resident makes French fries look crispy and ice cream irresistible. Pictures of her food appear in newspaper and magazine advertisements, on billboards and in numerous cookbooks. She tests recipes for publishers, including Costco's cookbooks on entertaining. One of her latest efforts is a free cookbook, "Chicken Simple," done for the Newcastle-based Washington Fryer Commission.

In the greater Seattle area, there are probably a dozen working food stylists and Naganawa's name is at the top of the list, said Lou Maxon, vice president at Iridio studios in Seattle. Maxon oversees the photographers who work with Naganawa.

"Styling food looks easier than it is," said photographer Darren Emmons. "Stylists have to have the eye to know what will look good on camera, how to make something look good on film, and JoAnne has it."

Naganawa has been in the business since the mid-1980s after being a stay-at-home mom. She went to college when her daughter was in high school but wasn't able to pursue her first love: textiles. Food classes fit her schedule and cooking was her second passion. "I was one of the last home economists to graduate from the University of Washington before the department closed," Naganawa said. "The school closed the next year."

She still loves textiles and recently made felt hats for holiday bazaars. But her trademark, among friends and professionals, is her cooking — often creative and always attractive.

If your home-cooked version of a recipe doesn't look like what's in the cookbook, don't despair, Naganawa said. "There's a reason you can't get it just right. The pros work on the pictures. And the pros include a food stylist and a prop stylist who brings in the right dishes, silverware, plates, cups and towels," she said. "Recently for a Costco shoot, there were three food stylists, two prop stylists and an assistant, and we got 10 shots in a day."

The worst photo shoot Naganawa had happened early in her career. "I was working with a photographer who was persnickety," she said. "We were shooting cheesecake and he got up on a ladder above the cheesecake to take the picture. He leaned over and his camera fell right into the cheesecake."

She had a second cheesecake waiting in the wings.

Naganawa makes multiple copies of dishes, roasting six chickens to get one perfect one for a photo. She always has backup because food literally wilts under bright lights. She remembers having six to eight cases of French fries on hand to get one perfect picture of a plate of fries. She'll pick up a half-dozen cases of fruit to get one bowl of perfect kiwis or apples.

Making picture-perfect food is more time consuming than putting dinner on the table and rounding up the family. Naganawa said three usable shots a day is considered good.

She adheres to professional rules and her own personal code. Photographs used as advertisement have to show the real food. She holds the same standards for cookbook photographs. If she has to substitute something to look like the real thing, Naganawa insists the substitute be edible.

She demonstrated, scooping up a look-alike for vanilla ice cream into a sundae dish. Her substitute: powdered sugar mixed with canned frosting.

"It is edible and sweet but nothing like ice cream," she said.

She set the dish on the table. It looked like bland ice cream. Naganawa looked around the studio and spied a branch of artificial cherry blossoms. She tucked a loose blossom into the "ice cream" and a sprig of the flowers around the base of the dish.

Zing! It went from plain vanilla to yummy vanilla.

"If you're having trouble making your plates look like something in the cookbook, think about placement," she said. "Rather than slopping it on the plate, add a little bit of garnish — fresh herbs for instance or with the ice cream, a sprig of flowers.

"You want the food to pop out at you, to be eye-appealing. When it looks good, it will taste better."

Sherry Grindeland: 206-515-5633 or sgrindeland@seattletimes.com

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