Portraits of Chef André Chiang, a Taiwanese chef and owner of five restaurants. He is the former head chef of the three Michelin star restaurant Le Jardin des Sens in France and known for his “Octo-philosophy” of eight elements which make up his dishes. In 2017, his Michelin 2-star Restaurant André was named the Best Restaurant in Singapore, and the second-best in Asia by Restaurant magazine. Restaurant André closed in 2018 but Chef André opened a new establishment, Bon Broth, in the city- state earlier this year.
These portraits were taken at Restaurant André, prior to the establishment opening for service, one afternoon; the whole shoot also included images of plates of food. I have found the image of Chef André Chiang at work being used multiple times without credit by, mainly, Asian food websites. While this is frustrating, from a visual perspective what is equally frustrating is the deterioration in the image use on these sites. The sites in question, for whatever reason, re- edit or crop the image and the quality of the subsequent results are poor. This is due to the fact a JPG is a compressed image; each time you edit and resave a JPG, the image is recompressed, leading to an accumulative loss of information, resulting in a decline in image quality over multiple saves. A more detailed post by a photographer who experimented on resaving one of his photographs 100 times can be found here.
The two images of Chef André not at work were taken at the entrance of Restaurant André and the accompanying waiting area. Both images made use of natural light; in the image of Chef André standing with his arms folded, the light is coming through the front door off camera left. Compared to this, light is coming in via a window off camera right in the image of Chef André sitting down; the presence of the table light, mostly cropped out of the image, in actual fact does little to add any extra light intensity to the scene, it regards to this frame it mainly serves as a prop.
