AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- What Katie Ate, her food blog and her James Beard award-winning first cookbook
- Works in
- Color; natural light only
- Camera
- Not documented in the interviews we found; she works on a tripod with scrims and diffusers
- Also
- Graphic designer and art director for more than a decade; food stylist and recipe writer; today works as Katie Quinn
- Start with
- What Katie Ate (Penguin Books Australia, 2012)
Katie Quinn Davies is an Irish food and lifestyle photographer, food stylist and cookbook author based in Sydney. She worked as a graphic designer and art director for more than a decade, then taught herself food photography in 2009. Her blog What Katie Ate made her name, and today she works under the name Katie Quinn.
The story
In February 2009 Katie Quinn Davies stopped working as a graphic designer. From then on she got up every morning at 7am. She cooked, styled and photographed three or four recipes a day. No client had asked for them. She was building a portfolio, hoping for small jobs in a year or so. “I learnt a lot through failures but as the year went on I started to see a decent progression,” she said.
The change had been coming for a while. Born in Dublin, she had worked from 1998 as a designer and art director, mostly in Dublin studios and for a time in the United States. In 2006 she moved to Australia to become a design director in Melbourne. She loved the work of Australian and Scandinavian food photographers, and photography had been a big part of her design degree.
During that first year she took a lighting course at Swinburne College. Her tutor told her to start a food blog and call it What Katie Ate. The name hooked her, because it reminded her of the What Katie Did books she read as a child. She set the blog up in June 2009 and wrote hard for two weeks. Then she stopped. Nobody seemed to be reading.
But she did not give up on the photographs. In March 2010 she moved to Sydney. Two months later her husband, Mike, was away in London for three weeks, so she tried the blog again. This time it took off. By early 2011 it had about 175,000 visits a month, and she was shooting a ten-page food story for Martha Stewart Living. In May 2011 the blog won Best Food Photography in Saveur's Best Food Blog Awards. Her first cookbook came out in 2012, and in 2013 it won the photography category of the James Beard Foundation awards.
Today, as Katie Quinn, she still cooks, styles and shoots. In 2022 she won the professional food photography prize at the Irish Food Writing Awards. A year later she photographed The Gathered Table, a charity cookbook of 55 recipes from Ireland's food world.
She had left design to find her real calling. Yet those years were not wasted. “I also feel the years of design has helped train my eye to become a better photographer,” she said.
The work
- 1998Begins her career as a graphic designer and art director, mostly in Dublin
- 2006Moves to Australia to work as a design director in Melbourne
- 2009Leaves design to teach herself food photography; first tries the blog What Katie Ate
- 2010Moves to Sydney and restarts the blog, which quickly takes off
- 2011Wins Best Food Photography in Saveur's Best Food Blog Awards
- 2012Publishes her first cookbook, What Katie Ate
- 2013What Katie Ate wins the James Beard Foundation award for photography
- 2022Wins Food Photography (professional) at the Irish Food Writing Awards
- 2023Photographs The Gathered Table, a cookbook for the Peter McVerry Trust
Lessons
Practise every day. Before she had any clients, she cooked and shot three or four recipes each morning for a year. The portfolio came from that routine.
Try again. Her blog failed after two weeks in 2009. A year later she started it again, and it changed her career.
Use what you already know. Her years as a designer trained her eye. Skills from an earlier job can make your pictures stronger.
Try this: for one month, cook one simple dish every morning and photograph it by a window, with no flash. Style the table yourself. At the end of the month, compare the first week with the last.
Gear
She has said little in public about her camera models. In a 2011 interview she described the kit she sets up on a shoot day.
Tripod: part of her standard setup for food shoots.
Scrims and diffusers: she shoots only in natural light, so she shapes window and daylight instead of using studio lights.
Books
What Katie Ate (Penguin Books Australia, 2012). Her first cookbook, a 304-page hardback that grew out of her blog. It came out in September 2012, with editions from Avery in the United States and HarperCollins in the UK. It mixes a food diary with how-to tips, stories and more than 100 simple, seasonal recipes from her travels, dinner parties and favourite places to eat. Irish and Australian influences run through it, from beef and Guinness pie to barbecue dishes. She cooked, styled and photographed it herself, and in 2013 it won the photography category of the James Beard Foundation awards. A good book for anyone who wants to see her moody, natural-light style across a whole project.
What Katie Ate on the Weekend (Avery, 2015). The follow-up to her first book, published in the US in April 2015 as a 320-page hardback; in Australia it is published by Penguin as What Katie Ate at the Weekend. It collects more than a hundred recipes for relaxed weekend entertaining: pizzas, pastas, salads, tapas, cocktails and desserts. Stories from her dinner parties and Sunday brunches sit next to photographs from travels in places such as Italy and Ireland. For photographers, it shows how she keeps one look across food, people and places.
The Gathered Table: A Taste of Home (Nine Bean Rows Books, 2023). A hardback charity cookbook compiled by the catering company Gather & Gather Ireland, with all proceeds going to the Peter McVerry Trust, which works with homeless people in Ireland. Chefs, bakers, butchers, farmers, producers and shopkeepers each gave a favourite home recipe, 55 in all, including dishes by Ahmet Dede and Sunil Ghai. Katie Quinn photographed the book. It is a warm collection for home cooks, and a chance to see her recent, lighter style.
