Interview With Harriet Harcourt - Food Photographer Extraordinaire

Beaconsfield photographer Harriet Harcourt recently won the Marks & Spencer Food Portraiture category in the 10th annual Pink Lady® Food Photographer of the Year Awards for her photograph ‘Mulled Pears’.

Open to professionals and non-professionals, the Awards celebrate the very best in food photography and film from around the world. This year they attracted over 10,000 entries from 80 countries.

Here’s the Finalists Gallery.

The categories cover the full cultural range of the depiction of food in society from styled food for magazines to images of families eating together in celebration of religious festivals, from depictions of the realities of food production to food growing in its natural setting.

Hailing from Wellington, New Zealand, and living in Beaconsfield for the past 10 years, Harriet is a seasoned food professional with more than 30 years’ experience.

Since arriving to live in WA, a budding interest in photography blossomed into a serious passion which inevitably led Harriet to add this new skill to her food-related activities.

A Cordon Bleu graduate, Harriet’s culinary skills and experience span a wide spectrum of activities across the food industry. This includes food styling, catering, film catering, demonstrating, recipe and product development, food columnist, and blogger.

She has been steadily building a client base which now includes the New York Times along with iconic West Australian brands Mrs Mac’s, Fogarty Wine Group, Clancy’s Fish Pubs, and Dome, amongst others.

Harriet was also the food technician for ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Trilogy, ‘King Kong’ and ‘Avatar’, designing and creating props food as part of these stories filmed in New Zealand. This included major scenes involving huge volumes of food, as well as producing ‘identical’ food items in two different scales when required.

Here’s a gallery of a few of Harriet’s other photographs she particularly likes, for one reason or another.

And here’s Harriet’s website.

You can also find her @harrietharcourt on Instagram and @harrietharcourtphoto on Facebook.

Harriet Harcourt kindly agreed to sit down with our editor, Michael Barker and explain how one gets to be a food photographer, and the ins and outs of the business. In the process Harriet focuses on photographs in the gallery, as well as Mulled Pears – which are Packhams, by the way!