Bobby Doherty’s Still-Life Photography

Bobby Doherty photographs things the way a set designer would: everything locked into place, lit flat and bright, the subject packed out to the edge of the frame. This selection from the Brooklyn photographer leans hard on food — cakes, creams, berries and truffles tiled across a pink ground until the picture stops being a photograph of dessert and becomes a pattern.

That is a harder line to walk than it sounds. Food photography usually sells appetite; Doherty’s work sells arrangement, using repetition and saturation to arrive at something closer to design. It is the crossover that keeps him in demand across editorial and commercial work — the rare photographer whose pictures function just as well as a spread and as a wallpaper.

More of his work: bobbydoherty.tumblr.com.