Giles Duley discusses his passion for all things food.
“I think I’ve always had a passion for eating”, Giles Duley, ‘The One Armed Chef’ and documentary maker jokes when asked about his love for cooking. His Scottish mother was “sent away to be a maid in a big manor house” and had to learn to make everything from scratch. Pair this with his father’s Italian roots, and Giles was raised in a family that loved to cook and eat, “I think I was brought up around a really good food culture without realising it. It was just normal”. Continuing, “then, years later, my real passion for cooking began partly for therapy, from when I was in war zones”.
Giles who has been awarded an MBE, began his career as a fashion photographer, capturing celebrities like Lenny Kravitz and PJ Harvey. His portrayal of Marilyn Manson was voted one of the 100 ‘greatest rock and roll photographs of all time’.
Increasingly concerned about the injustices he saw in the world, he began to search for ways in which he could help people and turned to documentary photography, “the only way I knew how to create change was with my camera.”
Visiting conflict zones around the globe, Giles’ career was put on hold after he stood on a landmine in Afghanistan and his injuries left him a triple amputee. A year later though, he was back in Afghanistan, continuing to photograph and document.
He found it challenging to settle back into normal life, “I would come home, and I had been in quite a dark place and to be honest… You come back from places like Moso, you come from Afghanistan, you just see horrible things.”
“So, you need to find a way to deal with the trauma, and I found cooking was the one thing I can do where I don’t think about anything else.”
Meditating on this, and still wanting to use his photography for good, Giles questioned, “how do you suddenly build a relationship with someone when you’re an outsider? I thought, well, what do you do in normal life?”
Taking his personal therapy on the road, presenting and creating the six-part tv show, The One Armed Chef, Giles sought to find that connection and unity through cooking and food. He does this by re-exploring places of conflict he had visited before. Now instead of purely documenting the lives of those afflicted, Giles cooks, eats, and ultimately learns from individuals or families. Giles says,
“Once you’ve shared bread and you’ve eaten and you’ve laughed, it changes the whole dynamic of a relationship. So why would you treat the person you’re documenting any different to how you’d treat a friend?”
Balancing the line between photographer and subject, Giles understands the power imbalance at play, “I never liked the idea of ‘us’ and ‘them’” and he believes that by first sharing a meal, sharing a story and a joke, barriers begin to break down and unity between individuals begins to grow.
“Now I have a rule that whenever I can, as soon as I meet somebody rather than say I’m here to photograph you”, Giles continues, “I will say I’m here to come and cook with you.”
Throughout his show, there are great moments of warmth, laughter and empathy, shared not between a subject and a photographer, but between friends, “I do find laughter, I do find resilience” says Giles.
“Food is the essence of humanity… food is life”.
For Giles the much of the media presents their subject as ‘victims’. They, “dehumanise the person… they become something you can’t relate to”. The One Armed Chef is all about relatability.
“For me, it’s really important that my story telling is reflective of all parts of life and culture.”
In her book ‘Photography’, American author and critic Susan Sontag describes the act of taking an image as ‘appropriating’ the subject, “It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and therefore, like power”. By breaking bread with someone, Giles attempts to break down that element of power, to appear with no prior knowledge of their situation, to encourage the individual to feel comfortable when he is behind the lens.
“I am a storyteller more than anything” Giles reflects and flipping from pure photography to cooking was ‘easy’.
“A lot of photographers I know are actually really good chefs and I think maybe both are about timing and science actually more than art. To me, they are a really natural flip.” However, there is a stark difference, he continues, “my photography is mainly about war, and I would say food is the opposite of war”.
“War is about destruction and hatred and food is about bringing people together with love.”
Giles sees the importance of food when worlds away from home. “In all the war zones I go to, the moment of respite always comes when people sit and eat whether it’s in a trench in Ukraine, a mud hut in South Sudan or on the front lines in Syria. When they eat, it is like a memory of home.” He continues, “there is something really powerful how food is always a moment of peace.”
For refugees too Giles believes food has the ability to connect people back to their homeland, “Food is the last thing people take with them as refugees, it stays with communities, long after they have lost their homes.”
In Scotland, however, food doesn’t always unify. During Covid, Giles and the film crew had planned to travel to Vietnam but ended up rerouting to due to the pandemic.
In one of the two episodes focusing on Scotland, they travelled to Jura and the abundance of organic, local produce was a shocking contrast to when they visited Glasgow. “The thing about Scotland that is criminal, is that disconnect between Glasgow, where there’s kids in school fainting because they were so hungry and then you travel an hour, and you have some of the most bountiful produce, seafood. It’s such a rich place for food.”
According to Glasgow City Council, 3 in 10 of Glasgow’s children under the age of 15 are living in poverty.
The Trussel Trust, a provider in emergency food, found that between April to September 2023, ‘they distributed the most food parcels ever in Scotland, including during the pandemic’.
For Giles, in Scotland, “It’s not about whether food unifies, it is the fact that we have lost our connection with the food… where it grows and connecting ourselves to nature. We’ve created this really screwed up culture of food, where the cheapest food in Glasgow is tinned food made somewhere on the other side of the world.” He continues, “organic food, local produce, should not be a luxury.”
Looking into 2025, Giles still sees himself as a photographer, “it’s just the tools I’m using to create have changed.” As a humanitarian and through The One Armed Chef, he plans to focus more on stories of hope, “everything I do is a celebration of people.”
