Hannah Collins

In the last 15 years of his life Noah Purifoy lived in the Mojave Desert where he created large-scale sculptures spread over ten acres. British photographer Hannah Collins (born 1956) made a series of exquisite black-and-white photographic studies of Purifoy’s assemblages and sculptures.

The Fragile Feast is the fruit of a collaboration between London-born, Barcelona-based artist and photographer Hannah Collins and the Catalan star chef Ferran Adrià, internationally acknowledged as one of the greatest chefs in the world. Adrià’s restaurant El Bulli, in Barcelona, which closed on July 31, 2011, was ranked top restaurant in the world for several consecutive years on the S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, drawing gastronomes from far and wide; as he likes to say, “the ideal customer doesn’t come to El Bulli to eat but to have an experience.” Adrià is also famed for his sourcing of ingredients, and in The Fragile Feast, Collins photographs 30 ingredients from the master chef’s kitchen, tracking them all the way from the farm to their final culinary presentation. Along the way, Collins portrays the landscapes in which these ingredients are grown and through which they travel en route to El Bulli.