ON THE COVER

BEHIND the scenes

with Chris Bersbach

I HAD A FEW different ideas for incorporating flour into the cover image of Dan, to give him some context with the story of his bakery. But it wasn’t until the day we were scheduled to shoot that it occurred to me to actually throw flour into his face for the portrait. When I arrived, I was talking Dan through my process and explained that I wanted to do something with flour, but I wasn’t too specific—I usually prefer not to jump directly into odd, conceptual stuff, preferring to start simple and let my subject get used to me and my camera before I ask them to do anything really out there. But Dan’s a creative guy, and he beat me to the punch. As soon as I brought up using flour in a non-specific manner, he volunteered that it should be all over his face. Exactly what I had been planning to lead up to. DAN IS A PAINTER as well as a baker, and during the cover shoot we had been talking about light and lighting. He offered a romantic description of the way the early morning sunlight passes through the steam from the oven at his bakery on the outskirts of San Luis Obispo. He suggested coming by early in the morning when they bake the baguettes to see it for myself. As you can see in the image below, he wasn’t kidding.

We made these portraits at Dan’s house, in his driveway. We shot against a couple different backgrounds, and I used my usual mix of digital and film capture. Dan was an absolute blast to work with, and a really good sport about trying anything that I asked of him. By the time we were done shooting, the driveway was a huge mess with all of the flour we’d spilled, and Dan refused to allow me help him clean up any of it. I’m still cleaning flour out of my equipment.