Lucia Bell-Epstein first put her camera skills to the test in one of society’s more volatile environments: the restaurant kitchen. She had just graduated from McGill University with a degree in art history, Islamic studies, and communications. A law school application was in the works. “One day, I was like, I can’t go into a corporate job or academia,” she recalls. “I needed to do something with my hands.”
Food, and the processes around it, has always mattered to Bell-Epstein, 25, who grew up on the Bowery as the child of artists. (Her father is photographer Mitch Epstein, and her mother is writer and editor Susan Bell.) The illustrious stretch of Manhattan is known for its restaurant supply stores, and their attendant cacophony—“stainless steel everywhere, fridges pulled out of trucks, shouting”—was the soundtrack to her neighborhood walks.
A babysitting gig won the then middle-schooler her first back-of-house position. Ned Baldwin, chef of the East Village bistro Prune at the time, saw the “weird snacks” Bell-Epstein concocted for his kids and asked her if she’d come into the kitchen to help with brunch prep. “It was an awakening,” she remembers.
Bell-Epstein, armed with a 35mm camera, made her way back into the kitchen post-college to train as a line cook under Jay Wolman at Brooklyn’s LaLou. She brought it along to help her visualize plating, but soon realized she wanted “to shoot all the shit that you don’t want to see—a spill on the floor or someone’s hands cutting something.” She kept her camera on standby, tucked into a jacket pocket or behind stacks of plates.
“There were definitely moments where it was like, ‘You should put it down. This is not the time to be shooting a beautiful radicchio pickled-cherry salad,’” she says. “But it made me make stronger images because I had to be like, I only have so much time.”
Bell-Epstein left the culinary world to pursue photography full-time in 2021: working under photography duo Gentl and Hyers; creating editorial campaigns for New York–based fashion line Colbo; exhibiting alongside Zora Sicher, Gray Sorrenti, and Turiya Adkins in a Gasp-organized group show; and shooting cookbooks with buzzy restaurateurs Nicholas Morgenstern and Ellie Bouhadana (both out next spring).
Nevertheless, the kitchen-insider status she earned at LaLou has proven invaluable in shaping her practice, which she likens to method acting. First comes a period of exploration, when she interviews clients (among them New York Chinatown antiques dealer Christopher Cawley, and the people behind Los Angeles’s Canyon Coffee and Brooklyn’s Public Records).
Then she draws preparatory sketches, mining films, paintings, and ephemera for inspiration. Next comes immersion: She shadows a subject for a week, learning their personal choreography and building a sense of trust. By the time the camera comes out, Bell-Epstein is an expert.
This fluency helps the photographer capture micro moments—a sigh, a wilted vegetable in a walk-in, a jacket ballooning from a gust of wind. She cites Bruce Nauman and Chantal Akerman as influences—gestural poets who deal in truth, ritual, and broken beauty. But Bell-Epstein is wary of the trap of aestheticization. “Beauty is a hornet’s nest,” she asserts. “I want my photos to be vehicles for collaboration, trust, and risk-taking. And I want the process to keep me attuned and honest.”
Want to meet more rising stars? See CULTURED's full list of 2023 Young Photographers here.
