Editorial · 2023
Egyptian Comfort Food — Editorial for Vogue Arabia
Vogue Arabia · Magazine Editorial
Vogue Arabia's spring food issue commissioned an eight-page editorial on Egyptian comfort food — koshary, mahshi, om ali, ful — through the eyes of Egyptian women cooking for their own families, not for restaurants.
The magazine's food director wanted the photography to feel cinematic, not nostalgic. No sepia, no copper pots-as-decoration. Egyptian food had been photographed too often as folk craft. This was an editorial about modernity.
The brief asked for one wide opener, six full-bleed stand-alone dishes, and a closing portrait diptych. Six different home kitchens. Eleven shoot days.
We treated the eight pages as a single film. The opening image is a wide of a Cairo kitchen at four in the afternoon — slanted light, a pot mid-simmer, no person in frame. The reader walks into the editorial like they've walked into a friend's apartment.
Each dish was shot in the home it was cooked in. The koshary frame is photographed on a marble countertop in Heliopolis. The mahshi is on a glass plate in Alexandria. We did not move dishes between locations; the geography of the editorial is real.
The closing diptych is a portrait of two women laughing — the cook and her daughter — over an empty plate of om ali. Editorially, it was the strongest argument for what Egyptian food actually is.
Project closes
Vogue Arabia
Magazine Editorial, 2023
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