actually cook out of My Last Supper,” says
Welch. “I think it’s more about flights of
fancy and imagination.”
“I’m not a food photographer,” says
Dunea. “There are people who do that so
well, who are trained and skilled. I didn’t
want to tread on their turf.”
An accomplished portrait photographer,
Dunea was inspired by an assignment she
received from Gourmet magazine in the late
Nineties to shoot a set of trading cards for
chefs who were, at the time, rising stars on
the restaurant scene. The story was nixed,
but Dunea was intrigued.
“I went to a bookstore and I saw a Bobby
Flay book, a Mario Batali book, a Lidia
Bastianich book, but I didn’t see something
that celebrated all of the chefs. That’s ex-
actly what this book is: a coffee-table cel-
ebration of chefs, of food and of eating.”
Like Dunea’s first volume, published in
2007 by Bloomsbury, the new book features
portraits of 50 chefs, and their answers to a
six-question questionnaire about their last
meal. For Dunea, the project is ultimately just
“a vehicle to take pictures,” not unlike her oth-
er books, including My Country: 50 Musicians
on God, America & the Songs They Love
(Rodale, 2010), which follows a similar struc-
ture. It’s “a chance to experiment with my
photography and to really challenge myself
For her new cookbook, My Last Meal: The Next Course, portrait
photographer Melanie Dunea photographed famous chefs including
(opposite page, right) Tom Colicchio and (this page, clockwise from
above, left) Bill Telepan, Alex Atala and Paul Liebrandt.
as a photographer,” she says. “Not having a
client or a brief, I could do anything I wanted.”
The portraits in My Last Supper vary greatly in style. Elegant, black-and-white portraits
are interspersed with color images, like a lurid two-page spread of Paul Liebrandt grinning diabolically from between slaughtered
cows and an almost garishly colorful shot
of Martha Ortiz recumbent on a barge in
Mexico. “That just fits her and her story
more,” Dunea says. “I always try to tell a story
with my photography.”
Momofuku Milk Bar also tells a story: the
tale of how the bakery spun off from the
wildly popular Momofuku restaurants in
New York City. (Author Christina Tosi had
been a Momofuku’s pastry chef before she
opened Milk Bar in 2008.) New York City-based photojournalist Gabriele Stabile has
shot in Gaza and Libya, but after he did some
documentary-style work for Gourmet (for
articles on a halal slaughterhouse and a soba
noodle factory), the magazine recommended
him to Momofuku’s owner, David Chang, to
shoot the restaurants’ first cookbook. “Gabri
is family,” says Tosi. “I knew there would be no
one else able to get the ‘story’ of Milk Bar in
such an intimate way—from our cast of characters on staff to each cookie, cake and pie.”
Rather than shooting the book’s food images in a studio setting, Stabile and Mark
Ibold, who acted as stylist, worked in situ. “I
know other food photographers, and most
of them have food stylists and they cook the
