In the ad business, tabletop direction poses special conceptual challenges. Directors are working on a small scale, but strive to bring a fresh perspective to the images they capture. The results can range from merely functional beauty shots to images that are unexpectedly marvelous in the imagination and scope they bring to bear on their subject. Director Mathilde De L’ecotais, who specializes in culinary photography, has a minimalist style and a sense of humor that puts a fresh spin on sardines, lobster, and even fast-food salad (in a memorable spot touting the presence of fresh Veggies at McDonald’s). Lacking formal training, she got her start as a photojournalist in Los Angeles, then embraced food as a subject when renowned chef Alain Ducasse recruited her to shoot desserts for a book on the subject. Her first film was “Fish and Chips,” an award-winning – and somewhat unsettling – look at the last moments of the fish that ended up on your plate.

How did you come to food as a subject for photography?

It just happened. (Chuckles.) I was a photojournalist for 10 years before I began shooting food. I met Alain Ducasse, who was looking for a photographer who had not done culinary photography, and I started with him. We did a book on desserts. After that, a production company in France called Paranoid asked me if I wanted to direct some films in the field of food photography. It was really traditional in France – as it still is – and I accepted. The first film I did was “Fish and Chips.” So it started like this. It worked pretty well pretty fast, and I decided to specialize in food.

Did you find it challenging to shift gears from straight photojournalism to culinary photography?

Yes.

Were you attracted to the work?

Yes, absolutely. You know why? Because I had no rules. I never studied photography, so I had no rules and no technique. I’d say I do it in a natural way. I’m playing with it. When you talk about food in France, it involves a lot of tradition – stories of your grandmother or how the food reminds you of your childhood. Things like that. The way most people were approaching food photography was with the Vichy tablecloth and the litle oily bowl behind. I brought it to another level – more modern and more abstract, and imagining the future more than the past.

You said you had no training in photography, but your work seems, technically, very brilliant.

It’s unusual – just because I don’t respect the rules of photography. Now, you must be a little bit of a technician when you talk about photography, anyway. But because I was not trained at school, I had no limits in what could be done. I just tried and tried until I got what I had in my mind. A lot of it is about good preparation. All of it is à©phà©mà¨re – it’s there, and then it’s not. At some point, you have the grace and you get the picture. Chance has a lot to do with it. Let’s say it’s a good match between chance and the prevention of chance.

But you have to be in the correct position, all the time, to take advantage of chance.

Most of the time when we’re preparing a film, I will play with the material days in advance to see how it reacts. When we are shooting, there is no time for experiments. But I can research it a few days before. There are many kinds of research. You research the type of food, and where to get it from – anywhere in the world – and then you research how you’re going to cook it and slice it, how thick and how thin.

And how it responds to the light, too?

Light and hot and cold and humidity and water and being pressed between glass. It can be any kind of thing.

Was the McDonald’s salad piece actually commissioned as an advertisement for television?

Yes. They ordered two films, one year apart.

Do you shoot digitally?

No, [usually] in 35mm. But it depends. When it’s not low-budget, I shoot 35mm, like for McDonald’s. If I shoot video, it’s HD. And I shoot also with the Phantom high-speed digital camera.

I wanted to come back to the “Fish and Chips” piece. This isn’t a commercial, is it?

I think it was Hewlett-Packard who asked a few artists and photographers who had never done a film before to imagine a film. I wrote the film and we shot it. We ended up at the Palais de Tokyo in France. I won two prizes with that film.

It’s provocative about life and death – and what leads to a meal.

(Laughs.) Oh, some people didn’t like that. It doesn’t leave you with no feelings.

It’s almost confrontational. I’ve watched it several times, and I appreciate it on an aesthetic level. But the first time through, it hits on a gut level.

Right, right. I play with the gut level and the aesthetic things. How terribly can you play with the aesthetics to make it feel like it’s right? It’s terrible because, basically, I’m filming a fish dying. And in some ways it’s so aesthetically beautiful that you would like to watch it again. But at some point, it just dies.

I can imagine that some people would be angry that you made them see that.

Yeah, but in the end, you know what? [The fish] didn’t die.

Well, the emotional experience of someone who watches it is quite different! Now, the lobster film …

I did this with a guy named Thierry Marx, who is a chef, so each of the films I did with him is a recipe. If I captured images from the film, you could make the recipe.

Some of the shots are almost abstract. And once the lobster has been taken apart, it’s almost unrecognizable.

The very little things look like they could be very large. A small egg of a salmon could look like a planet. I like to do that. It makes you feel that we must be humble as humans.

Do you keep any artists or photographers in mind as inspiration or reference?

No, not really. No. I don’t have any TV in my house, for example. I don’t really look at other people’s work – people who are doing work like me today. I look at books of classical and well-known people. They can be painters and photographers and sculptors, all types of mediums in art. But I don’t look at other advertising.

Is that a deliberate choice?

Yes. I don’t want to copy anyone.

Have you considered other, similar subjects?

I’m doing some cosmetic shoots. With all these natural [cosmetics] products coming out, I’m workign a lot in advertising as a photographer – and, I hope, as a director – on cosmetics.

I wonder if there are opportunities to tell similar stories in that realm.

We have caviar cream, so we’re not that far off. Why not?

How elaborate is your lighting? Do you have a lot of different equipment, or is it simple?

In some ways it’s irrelevant in my work. Sunlight would be fine as long as it worked with the speed of the camera. I work with directors of photography that are really good. We hold hands when we do those kinds of films. As I do it in photography I do it in films, and I don’t respect the rules. In my films there are a lot of light accidents. I push the material to the limits of what is acceptable and what can be printed on the film, and I need someone who will work in the same direction and can accept this – which can be a fight on a film.

Do you end up shooting a lot of footage just to get those accidental bits?

No. I’m pretty fast when we’re on the set, but I work a lot up front by myself, and then I can direct everyone in the direction I want to go. We never have the same thing twice. You have to consider that it is natural. It’s usually the real textures and the real things, so you must accept a level of what you can’t direct. And sometimes accidents make you feel that it is really natural, and brings you to nature. Simple things.

Anything else you’d like to add?

To finish this interview, I would say that with any chef, or anyone that brings you food to your table, you will have the first contact with the eye ‘ you see the thing ‘ and then you smell and then you taste it. In photography or film, the only thing is the eye. That’s it. I try to bring as much imagination around to introduce the other senses that we miss in film and photography.

So your visual work gives the illusion that all of the viewer’s senses are engaged.

Well, we must be humble with this. It’s through my eyes. So it is what it is.