X-M5: Chisom Okoye x Your One Day

11.02.2024

As child I imagined that Heaven would smell like freshly baked bread. Every Saturday night, my mum would set the bread maker to bake a loaf of whole wheat bread and a loaf of white bread. I remember waking up to the smell of bread wafting through our bungalow. This sweet smelling aroma was a welcome alarm gently coaxing us to wake up and get ready for church. We would sit at the dinning table, in our Sunday’s best, each child with two slices of piping hot bread, some fried eggs, and butter. Butter that melts as soon as it touches the bread; creating a blissful, simple, and pure flavour. 

I grew up surrounded by food. Baked food. Sweet food. Food that makes the youngest of hearts leap for joy. Surrounded by cakes, pies, biscuits, and donuts. All kinds of sweet and savoury items came out my mum’s bakery into the hands of eager customers. We baked long into the night. Sometimes, with no electricity, using candles or lanterns that cast deep and elaborate shadows. It was hard work, but there was a lot of warmth and keenness to learn the science and art of baking.  

My baking journey started with cake mixes and canned biscuits. Biscuits that make a marvelous pop sound when you twist to open. I fell in love with these golden pucks the first time I had them while holidaying in America. Peering into the lit oven, I’d watch impatiently as the biscuits rose mile high and fluffy. Nothing evokes the memory and nostalgia of childhood like buttery biscuits, a wash of honey, and a dollop of fruit jam. We ate them every day. We ate them for breakfast, we ate them an afternoon snack, and as a side for dinner until the cans of biscuits finished or until the end of our vacation. 

It wasn’t long before I graduated from baking cake mixes and canned biscuits to baking from scratch. When my mum taught me the exacting science of weighing and scaling ingredients, the arduous task of mixing butter and sugar with you hands until pale and fluffy, and the benefits of gentle touch once flour is added. This was the secret to baking the simplest of cakes- A Pound Cake. A nutmeg spiced pound cake. Made with a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of eggs, a pound of flour, sprinkle of nutmeg, and a splash of milk, baked and adorned with a dusting of icing sugar, frosting, or left plain. 

Baking was a way to express my creativity, but I knew, deep down in the crevices of my lost childhood passions, that there was something missing in my appreciation of the craft. There was an impermanence to the work that left me feeling unmotivated, unwilling to challenge myself, and hesitant to continue learning. It was in this state that I purchased my first Fujifilm camera to take photos of the cakes I made for sale. I bought the camera because of its dignified classic beauty, but I fell in love with the simplicity. It was then I realized what was missing. 

Photography made me care. It reignited my love for food, beauty, and art. It created a whole new world for me, a way of seeing and observing, it gave me a new motivation as I desperately wanted to learn all I could about the art of photography. I would check out photography and art books from the library, watch films with keen eye, observe light and how it affected my mood, appreciate the foliage of plants and colours of flowers, and conjure up scenes and ideas in my head. Now, not only do I want to bake something delicious, I also wanted to create something beautiful.   

My ideas come in moments of silence and stillness, typically when I am in commune with nature. For this project, I wanted to create memories of childhood, memories of baking a spoon into a wedding cake because we didn’t see that a spoon fall into the batter in our candle lit home, memories of celebrating birthdays on the beach, picnicking with friend in high school, of freshly baked bread and popped biscuits.  

The X-M5 was what the perfect camera to recreate my theme of nostalgia, of warmth, of solitude and of companionship. Its many Film Simulation provided the exact look and feel of my memories. With the Film Simulation and the Fujifilm recipes, I can create beautiful images, straight of camera, with little or no post processing. 

Using a camera and capturing images is akin to baking a cake. You can make it as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. I like simple. I like when my camera does most or all of the processing, leaving me to focus on the what matters most to me- the science of baking, the art of creating a scene, and telling a story.