Preserved - A Still Life Published in PhotoED Magazine Canada

There were things you couldn't get in Saudi Arabia in the early days. Not easily, anyway. Fresh live yoghurt was hit and miss. Healthy, natural snacks for children, were harder to come by than you'd expect.

So you made things yourself, like a Prepper sometimes!

Fruit leather was one of them. Though one thing we do get that is magical, and they even grow in our gardens in Saudi, is Mangoes! I dried and rolled them, stacked on the kitchen counter next to a piece of patterned fabric I'd pulled out because the colours worked. I made it, styled it, photographed it, and wrote the recipe. Every month I contributed both a written article and the editorial food photography to Focus Magazine, the KAUST community publication as a way to give back to my community. I needed my photographs to make the reader want to make the recipe. That was the job.

I called this one Preserved.

Not just because fruit leather is a form of preservation, one of the oldest methods humans have used to hold a season in place. But because something about this image held my attention. The amber of the rolled mango against the dark damask fabric. The warmth of it and it had a special glow from the natural light filtering in from them kitchen door. A moment from a kitchen in Saudi Arabia that has outlasted the magazine it was made for.

Preserved is live this week in PhotoED Magazine, Canada's one and only photography magazine, following its selection in the Still Life challenge where it placed in the top 20% at All Star level with 6,438 votes.

PhotoED has been the sole voice of photography in Canada for decades. To have work recognised in that context, work that started as a recipe photograph for a community magazine, is not something I take lightly.I

f you would like to see more of my artistic photography work or discuss a commission, get in touch.