In fall 2012, ESPN asked Austin, Texas–based prop stylist Robin Finlay and her photographer husband Adam Voorhes to deliver images of torn-apart basketballs in time for the NCAA tournament. Their only instruction? “Destroy a basketball in as many ways as you can come up with,” Finlay says.
Left: Food stylist Randy Mon uses his favorite tools—chopsticks—to place a raspberry atop a perfectly sculpted pile of nondairy whipped topping for an image that will appear on the product’s package. Right: Prop stylist Robin Finlay had 48 hours to build an image for a Details cover about visionary people. At first, she and photographer Adam Voorhes considered 3-D printing the design, but then decided that creating it with foam board, X-Acto knives and a ton of Super Glue would be faster. The floating sections were hung with thin wire, which Voorhes retouched out of the image.
So she bought sixteen balls and used some imagination. She cut one apart with sharp shears, shoved another through a wood chipper and crushed yet another with a vice. Voorhes took one out to a local ranch and blew it apart with a shotgun. After a semi-successful attempt to freeze one of the balls with dry ice, Finlay went all out. “We ended up with a giant tank of liquid nitrogen that we get refilled and use from time to time,” she says. “We like to freeze things and blow things up.”
Which is convenient, because neither is an unusual request for a prop stylist like Finlay. When a magazine wants a perfect shot of a model brain, it’s her job to figure out that casting a brain out of resin will produce an unwanted, cloudy result, whereas casting one out of sugar will lead to a perfectly clear model organ. When Caesars Hotels and Casinos wanted an image of its laurel-leaf logo assembled from knife blades, it was up to her to drive to eleven stores to procure 60 versions of the exact same knife. When she needed a completely pink pig—no spots, please—for a story in Details magazine, she used Craigslist and Facebook and finally found one at a local barn.
For food and prop stylists, almost no request is too weird. The final image needs to fit a certain aesthetic, whether it’s a look for a magazine cover, an advertisement or the front of a cereal box. Client work falls into two main categories: commercial, which includes advertising, packaging and catalogs, and editorial. Commercial jobs tend to pay a lot more, but editorial usually allows for more creativity. On editorial shoots, the stylists often create the image’s final aesthetic themselves. “Advertising pays the bills,” says Helen Quinn, a New York–based artist and stylist. “Editorial is supposed to be more beautiful so you can use it in your book. You want the editorial to be super-gorgeous or it’s not worth it.” Magazines also provide high-profile exposure, which helps stylists land the cushier commercial gigs.
In advertising work, stylists are usually following a creative director’s specific vision, which could have them, say, spending an hour and a half arranging a bay-leaf garnish for a photo on the packaging of a cookware set, as San Francisco–based food stylist Randy Mon found himself doing not long ago. As silly as that may sound, the work that food and prop stylists do is crucial for the agencies and magazines they work for. “I think of them as being really important in making a shoot look effortless,” says Paul Wang, senior design director at Prophet, a San Francisco branding firm. “I’ve done shoots where the prop stylist is almost as important as the model or wardrobe—if not more important.”
That can be particularly true in food styling, where something as detailed as the way cereal flakes are arranged can make or break a photo. Though the industry has mostly moved away from the days when turkeys were shellacked and strawberries were painted with lipstick, food stylists still use a lot of tricks to create appetizing photos. To make sure a bowl of cereal looks perfect, Mon will start with “a carefully manicured bed of Crisco, so if you’re sticking flakes or granola clusters you can spend two hours composing each flake before ever adding milk.” Aesthetically pleasing bacon starts in a microwave for a perfectly curled look, then is cooked slowly, submerged in oil so it browns uniformly. The best way to get perfectly gooey cheese? Melt it with a clothes steamer.
Sometimes, though, the most complicated parts of a shoot have nothing to do with the food. In spring 2013, Mon was sent to a Napa, California, vineyard to work on a television commercial for Canadian cookie brand Peek Freans. The concept was to use a rigged table that would pop up and spill all its contents, tossing food and breaking china. Played backward and in slow motion, the footage appears to show all the ingredients coming together. “Things rise up very slowly and collide and come back down to the table as platters of cookies,” Mon says. In real life, of course, Mon, his three assistants and the prop stylist had to prepare for everything to fall apart—which meant having eight versions of the same porcelain teapot and saucer, plus plenty of oats and chocolate chunks, which he made himself by chopping bars of chocolate and melting them down. “The job for me was more logistical than creative,” Mon says. “I was given a budget of $1,200, which wasn’t very much, and had to decide, given doing it eight times, how to ration that money—how much to spend on chocolate chunks and cherries out of season at $92 a case.”
For an AARP The Magazine article titled “The Great American Diet,” Finlay was asked to create a sixteen-foot map using a variety of healthy foods. She started on the West Coast and moved east, but by the time she got to Pennsylvania she realized she hadn’t used any fish—which explains the slab of salmon on the thankfully square-shaped state. She built the map in the middle of winter, but had to turn off the heat so nothing would rot.
Logistics often are a huge part of the job, particularly in magazine work, where there are tight deadlines and last-minute requests. A few years ago, Los Angeles–based prop stylist Juliet Jernigan was on a dinner party–themed shoot in Mexico with Julia Roberts when she realized that the only available flowers looked too tropical. “I ended up spending a lot of money to get flowers flown in overnight, and I don’t think they were even in the picture.”
The majority of the industry is based in New York and Los Angeles, where calling an animal handler to ask for ten white ducks for a shoot with Amanda Seyfried or a furniture consultant for Gatsby-era chairs—as Jernigan has done—is not unusual. But in Austin, where Finlay styles almost entirely for her photographer husband, those kinds of services just aren’t available, hence the Craigslist pig.
New York–based Quinn and Los Angeles–based Jernigan also have agents to help them land gigs and negotiate their fees. Prop and food stylists are often paid day rates. Though there’s a huge range, Quinn’s New York–based agent Pat Bates says $600 is a standard day rate for editorial work, catalog projects range from $750 to $1,250, and advertising work is generally between $900 and $2,500. Agents like Bates field calls from magazines and ad teams, who are usually looking for a specific stylist. “Photographers usually have pretty strong opinions about who is on their A-team,” she says. “They want to get those people on hold as early as possible.” Unless it’s a last-minute call for help or a certain person is unavailable, clients usually want someone they’ve worked with before.
That can make it hard to get started in the business. There’s no prop- or food-styling major in art school, and although there might be classes and seminars out there, the best way to become a stylist is by learning on the job. Finlay was an art director at Austin Monthly when she met Voorhes and started styling his shoots for the magazine. On their first anniversary, he asked her to leave her job and work with him. Jernigan also started on the editorial side; her first job out of school was in the bookings department at Elle. As she moved up the chain, working with photographers, she realized that what she really wanted to do was style shoots. “I became obsessed with making photographers’ wishes come true,” she says. “Everyone was so busy—I just started pitching ideas.” Mon had been waiting tables for years when a buddy noted that somebody must be making the burgers in the McDonald’s commercials look so good. “That was my epiphany,” he says. He picked up the Yellow Pages and cold-called food stylists, asking if they used assistants. Three years later, he struck out on his own. Quinn’s career was born out of an editorial emergency. One night, a friend who was working for Martha Stewart’s now-defunct kids’ magazine called asking for help sewing children’s stockings. “I was in the textile business,” she says. “I did not know what a stylist was.”
Almost 20 years later, she’s worked on countless shoots and refined her own set of essential styling tools. Recently, she had a miniature garden 3-D printed for a Wired magazine spread—from a teeny tiny tree to a teeny tiny human. But since she had only one week and a limited budget, she had them printed without color and hand-painted them herself. Finlay can’t work without Super Glue—or compressed air cans, which help glue-gun adhesive set even faster. And if you need to create beautiful flames, rubber cement is the ideal combustible. Mon’s go-to is chopsticks—for arranging single grains of rice on a spoon, taking the dimple out of a napkin and picking up avocado without marking it, chopsticks are the only way to go.
That kind of attention to detail is what attracts photographers and creative directors to individual stylists. If an image is going to show a woman in the rain, Wang wants the stylist to show up with a dozen different umbrellas. “What I hope is that the prop stylists take it upon themselves to show me some stuff in their arsenal—that I didn’t ask for—that could really make a huge difference in the shot.’’ ca
Los Angeles–based prop stylist Juliet Jernigan is no stranger to working with animals. Here, she poses with a giant snake during a 2012 InStyle magazine shoot celebrating the 50th anniversary of James Bond. The project featured 007’s girls through the years—from Jane Seymour to Michelle Yeoh
