Before he started his own project in winter 2010, Wayne Martin’s photos always had someone else’s touch on them. Throughout his career in photojournalism and corporate photography, he always had people telling him what to shoot and how to shoot it. But his book, Cranberries Revealed: From the Marsh to the Table, has just his own fingerprints on it. “It was so freeing to be able to do this all on my own, without anyone looking over my shoulder,” he says.
The 84-page book was released in March and is presented in three parts, “Art and Beauty of the Cranberry,” “Cranberry Culture” and “Cranberry Inspirations.”
Martin calls part one the “artsy fartsy” look at cranberries. It’s where he started the project—in the studio, slicing, dicing and creating patterns.
For part two, Martin went back to the cranberry marshes of central Wisconsin where he grew up to take aerial shots of cranberry harvests. From a plane he describes as a “lawn chair on a stick,” he captured countryside bathed in rich fall colors. “I couldn’t stop shooting,” Martin says. “It was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever done … every direction I pointed the camera there was another awe-inspiring picture.”
Part three features award-winning cranberry recipes that Martin made, staged and photographed. “Without the recipes, it’d just be another pretty book of pictures,” he says. The recipes “transcend” cranberries’ traditional role at the Thanksgiving dinner table, highlighting the berry in recipes like cranberry and wild rice pilaf and cranberry baked chicken. Available at Common Good Books, The General Store, Leipold’s of Excelsior, Excelsior Bay Books, Kowalski’s Markets and several other Twin Cities locations; $24.95.
