In general, any tourist experience, in order to be completed, must also include details about the food. Although I was attracted by the idea of food photography, I have never gone as far as to be able to declare myself a classic food photographer. Similar to many other situations, in the presentation of this topic, I have always tried to include that element of spontaneity that I always felt best in the street. So, what really interest me in this space can probably be called “street food photography” . Back in the day, when I was at the beginning of my collaboration with stock agencies, I tried very hard to adapt my style to a commercial stock-photography, useful for designers.
One of the important ideas in those days was to create a set of images with different types of sushi against a white background, a task better achieved in a studio. So, I set up my famous first ad hoc studio in the tatami room, next to a Shinto temple, in the heart of Kyoto. This way I succeeded to specialise a bit in the 100% Japanese sushi story. Since Internet was lacking information on the subject, I had to do some fieldwork to find first-hand details from trusted sources about the types of sushi I intended to photograph. It was exciting to collect data from different sources in a special linguistic-cultural combination, Romanian, English and Japanese. I have reached out to salesmen, waiters, my colleagues in the laboratory and then integrated all the information from “these sources” with the very little data from Internet. In this way, I discovered that there are two Japanese ways of eating raw fish. The first and most famous in the world is “sushi”.
This, in the classical version, is the combination of a piece of raw fish meat with a quantity of boiled rice masterfully shaped by the skillful fingers of Japanese chefs. Rice, thus, becomes a type of base on which meat is then applied. Between rice and meat, there is specific and quite hot green addition, wasabi, and then with the help of chopsticks all this aggregate is soaked in soy sauce. It turns out to be one of the most special dishes I have ever tried. There are several options of sushi. Sometimes the meat is replaced by a kind of omelette or salt cured roe.
There are also varieties of sushi rolls (uramaki), which may contain instead of meat, vegetables surrounded by rice shaped cylindrically and maintained in shape by a thin sheet of seaweed. There is also a conical variety of sushi with quite exciting fillings wrapped as well in seaweed. These conical types are the so-called “party sushi”, traditionally used only on special occasions. These are rolled by hand, so there’s no need for any special equipment like a sushi mat. Then, there are other “non-Japanese” types of sushi such as “California rolls”, sometimes called “rainbow rolls”, in which raw meat is combined with avocado and various types of rice.
And besides sushi, there is a “specialty” of raw fish meat that is “sashimi”. It is often included in the category of “a kind of sushi” by those unfamiliar with this type of food. But in reality, it is something different than sushi. It is a Japanese delicacy. It’s actually a piece of raw fish meat that is eaten just like that after dipping in soy sauce.
From my point of view, the tastiest types of sushi and sashimi are those with salmon or tuna.
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