THE FIRST INGREDIENT
Worldwide · 2018–2025
Bread is one of the simplest foods we know.
Flour. Water. Salt. Time.
And yet, wherever we travelled, it told a different story.
For nearly eight years, we travelled across the world for The First Ingredient, photographing bakers, families, ovens, hands, ingredients and traditions. What began as a commission became a journey through cultures connected by something almost universally understood: bread.
We entered bakeries before dawn, family kitchens, factories, market stalls and homes. We watched dough being mixed by hand and by machine, bread baked in wood-fired ovens, on hot stones, in metal drums and industrial production lines. Again and again, bread opened a door — to people, place, memory and everyday life.
Bread was our way in. The people were the story.
The First Ingredient began with an invitation from Dutch baker Johan Pater: to create a tribute to the craft of baking, seen not through the bread itself, but through the people who make it.
From the beginning, the bakers were at the heart of the project. We wanted to know who they were, where and how they worked, what had been passed down to them, and what they would pass on. Following bread around the world became a way of entering lives we might otherwise never have encountered.
The First Ingredient began with an invitation from Dutch baker Johan Pater: to create a tribute to the craft of baking, seen not through the bread itself, but through the people who make it.
From the beginning, the bakers were at the heart of the project. We wanted to know who they were, where and how they worked, what had been passed down to them, and what they would pass on. Following bread around the world became a way of entering lives we might otherwise never have encountered.
The differences were immense. A baker working through the night in a modern production bakery seemed, at first, to have little in common with someone kneading dough by hand in a family kitchen thousands of kilometres away. The ingredients changed, the ovens changed, the scale changed.
But the gestures often did not.
Hands testing dough. Flour brushed from a table. The concentration of someone who knows by touch when something is ready. Knowledge repeated so often that it has become instinct.
Over the years, the project became as much about continuity as it was about bread. About knowledge passed from one generation to another, about work beginning long before most people wake, and about a craft that is both ancient and constantly changing.
We photographed what we encountered rather than what we expected to find. The grand and the ordinary, industrial precision and improvisation, old traditions alongside new technologies. There was no single way to be a baker, just as there was no single story bread could tell.
After nearly eight years on the road, those encounters came together in The First Ingredient — a book bringing the people, places and stories of the project into one continuing narrative.
What began as a tribute to the baker became, for us, something larger: a portrait of a profession seen across cultures, generations and borders.
Different bread. Different lives. The same human gesture of making something for others.