‘at home with’ andrew zimmern
The New York Times | Orono, Minnesota
Before Andrew Zimmern was a James Beard Award winner and the face of two decades of food television, he was homeless in New York. His trajectory from nothing to a stunning home in Orono, MN filled with objects gathered from forty years of eating his way through the world is the story the house tells. The NYT "At Home With" series sent me there to photograph it.
The assignment is a specific discipline. You're working inside someone's private space, over a single day, trying to find the pictures that reveal something true about the person who lives there without manufacturing a narrative around them. The kitchen says something. A shelf of cookbooks or a particular artifact brought back from somewhere does, too. The challenge is reading the room quickly enough to know what's worth staying with and resisting the instinct to over-arrange what's already there.
Zimmern is an easy subject in the sense that his life is embedded in everything around him. The harder job was editing it down, deciding which details carry the story and which ones just fill the frame.