Welcome to Eat Sleep Instagram , our weekly series of conversations with photographers behind the most drool-worthy Instagram accounts about how they’re navigating the digital age, deliciously.
This week, Taste Talks photographer Mackenzie Anne Smith talks to Rebekah Peppler ( @rebekahpeppler ), a Brooklyn and Paris-based food writer and stylist. Her clients include The New York Times , Saveur and Food Network among others. She’s also worked on a slew of cookbooks (recent titles include Bowl by Lukas Volger, Asian-American by Dale Talde and the upcoming Butter and Scotch by Allison Kave and Keavy Landreth. Her book Honey was released in April 2014. She’s back in Paris for the summer researching, writing and working on projects with her American and French clients.
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Taste Talks: So first off, we have to know: how did you get this cross-continental life?
Rebekah Peppler: I started splitting my time between Paris and Brooklyn last August and it’s been a damn good fit both professionally and personally. Since I don’t have to physically be in one place for most of my work, I have a modicum of flexibility and I’ve really leaned into it. So, for a large part of the summer, I’ll be living and writing in France (while also fitting a bigger, more personal trip elsewhere in August). It’s one of the great benefits about being a freelancer in a digital world.
Taste Talks: How much time do you spend on social media?
Rebekah Peppler: Maybe too much? Maybe not enough? I try to limit my time on social media because it can eat up a lot quickly. That said, I’m my own social media manager and whether I post or not, I’m on Instagram pretty much every day for both work and play, checking in on what people are up to and staying in contact with the people that I follow. I curate my follow list pretty closely and it’s a mix of folks in food and media, close friends, a few people whose aesthetic I just love and a couple of French language Instagrammers. My French teacher in Paris, Carrie Anne James , has an awesome handle: @frenchisbeautiful . She posts pronunciation lessons, quotes and other incredible helpful snippets that keep me sharp even when I haven’t been in Paris or studying as much as I should. I also love @talkinfrench @frenchwords and @frenchgirls_doitbetter .
I feel like Instagram has created this really lovely and quite intimate world that you can curate and use to your advantage outside of the lens of social media. Whenever I meet people in person who I follow on Instagram, I feel like I sort of already know them and it allows for both a conversation starter and to skip the initial introductions and dig right in. You get a relative feel for someone via their feed and it gives you this sweet jumping off point. I’ve been lucky enough for it to blossom into some pretty incredible relationships. Thibault Charpentier Kayser ( @hebdomania ) was the first friend I made in Paris—we had followed each other for years before finally meeting in person and it was love at first Instagrammable coffee (thanks @fsparrows ! We love you!) My woman crush everyday/work wife Liz Clayman ( @lizclayman ) and I met via Instagram and knew within the first 5 minutes of our real life drinks together that we were going to collaborate professionally. More than that, we knew we would be fast friends. Flash forward a few years and we’ve worked on multiple projects together, taught a food styling and photography workshop (and are planning our next), spent the 4th of July camping upstate and traveled around India for a month (she and our friend Carishma ( @thegreenestbean ) get full credit for nursing me back from the edge when I got the worst food/water poisoning of my life in Goa). Next month she’s coming to France to help me ring in my 30th.
Taste Talks: I don’t know you very well, but I feel like I could spot a Pepplergram from across the room. How do you do it?
Rebekah Peppler: Ha! Thank you so much! My job as a writer and a food stylist is typically to tell somebody else’s story and Instagram offers this beautiful platform to curate and express my personal voice and aesthetic. I think what speaks to me most is that, while Instagram is certainly a visual platform, I put just as much thought and nuance into the text as I do the images I post. I think about sentence structure and wording in the same way I do the lighting and composition. I’ve really enjoyed and embraced the caption aspect of Instagram and use it in tandem with the visuals to tell a story that’s fully my voice.
That said, I definitely had to grow in my voice, and it has shifted—I think for the better—as I’ve learned more about who I am as a writer and a stylist. If I look back far enough on my Instagram feed the shifts are dramatic to me though hopefully not as intense to the eyes of others. When I teach food styling workshops, I always make the point that it’s very hard to teach aesthetic beauty. First, it’s such an amorphous concept—constantly shifting with the current culture. And second, while it’s certainly something you can hone and continue to unearth, there’s a base level of intuition when it comes to beauty that’s not a learned skill. For me, it starts with understanding both what is considered beautiful in a more universal context in food and current culture as well as what looks good to you personally. Being able to differentiate, compare and contrast those is important and, in my opinion, the root of curating a personal aesthetic.
Taste Talks: Do you have any guidelines for posting on Instagram?
Rebekah Peppler: You know, I like rules. A lot. I hold myself to a one post a day rule and my type-A brain likes the idea of knowing that I have one a day, that they don’t accrue and if I don’t use it, I don’t use it. It gives me space to think carefully about what I want to put out there while also allowing me to step away from my phone.
That rule has also been a tool to push me to be cognizant of posting something that feels special, beautiful and indicative of the moment. My feed is 80 to 90% food and includes a mix of things I’m working on professionally as well as personal projects, meals and travels. I’ve really been loving being able to look back on my feed and know where I was, what I was working on or what I was going through personally whether or not that backstory is entirely explicit to my audience. It’s a time capsule of sorts.
I don’t pay incredibly close attention to what time I post, but you definitely won’t find me posting super late at night (nor taking photos super late at night because I rely on all natural light—another way I keep a stable aesthetic). I do, however, take time zones into consideration when I’m traveling. For example, when I’m in Paris, I’m 6 hours ahead of the East Coast and I don’t love posting in the middle of the night EST. I generally try to post when the majority of my followers are awake and (hopefully) interested in what I have to say.
That said, rules are meant to be broken, so I do make exceptions! When Liz and I were in India last January, she was totally flummoxed that I wasn’t posting more than one picture a day, especially because the country itself is veritable feast for photography: the light stunning, locales striking, food incredible, people amazing…it was just an onslaught of awesome. So, on that trip, there was one day that I posted (gasp!) four pictures. I think I gave myself a pass because I had just gotten over a sickness so bad there was fear in all parties involved that I wouldn’t make it. That said, I spaced them out between morning and evening and still felt a fair amount of guilt. The thing is, Liz is an absurdly talented photographer and I was much more interested in sending people over to her handle for peeks into our days then trying to capture it all on my feed.
I get the sense we are only scratching the surface with you on Instagram. How do you approach personal branding on social media and still maintain a sense of authenticity without airing every moment the internet?
I think there is a way to be 100% authentic without being completely transparent on social media. And that balance, while difficult to achieve, is incredibly important to me. Life isn’t perfect, I’m certainly not perfect, and pretending that’s the case in my online presence is an ideal I’m not interested in perpetuating. That said, there’s a fine line that I try to toe between transparency in my professional versus personal life. The lines between the two blur occasionally—and I think that’s an honest and real thing—but I also don’t especially care to offer up the whole of my private life. I value my personal relationships immensely and if something is going on, my close friends and family will know about it—they don’t need to get their news online.
That said, everything I post on Instagram is a reflection of what’s happening in my life and I’m very careful to keep it that way. There is curation, of course—it’s what I do for a living and I think that fact is clear when you come to my handle—but there’s never a post that doesn’t reflect a professional or personal happening in real time. And, when aspects of my private life slip in, it’s always in a way that everyone involved feels comfortable with. While I’m not going to explicitly share something I’m going through in all its gory details on this platform, I also don’t feel the desire to hide the fact that I too have the occasional terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
As I mentioned earlier, the captions are just important as the images to me and if there’s something I feel comfortable sharing that’s applicable to my experience without sharing someone else’s private details, I like to do so on occasion. It can take form in a poem that I love, a quote that speaks to me (I keep a running list of these in a note on my phone so sometimes a photo will be inspired by words that have struck me or vice versa) or it can be something more directly pointed towards a moment, event, or particular person. There’s also a fair amount of puns that sneak their way into my captions, mostly/entirely for my own amusement. I’m shameless—the cornier the pun the more I love it. I finally finally got someone I love very much to laugh out loud when she saw my Instagram (I was in the room—it was real and it was glorious). So, I’m holding onto that moment pretty tightly and letting it feed my need to pun.
So how do you decide when to tag other Instagrammers and when to keep things to yourself?
Rebekah Peppler: First: If there’s anyone involved in making the image they get full credit. Full stop.
There’s this question of tagging people in posts rather than simply mentioning them in a comment below. It really depends on the situation but if I’m working with anyone and they’ve contributed to the image or the day they’re going to get credit for it. Since mentioning doesn’t link to their profile with any longevity, I tend to cross reference or lean towards a tag. The role of Instagram for me is so tied to these shout outs and credits. The point is to create connections and share and promote those people in the industry who I love.
Speaking of, I have a few friends who I work and play with regularly and we kind of blend this private and public life which makes me feel comfortable sharing both private and professional experiences that I have with them: Liz Clayman who I spoke about earlier is one such friend/colleague. Michael Harlan Turkell ( @harlanturk ), a photographer with whom I work regularly (we actually just shot his upcoming book a few weeks back), is another colleague I also consider an extremely close friend. He, his wife and I ended up having Thanksgiving in Paris together last year. When we travel together and we work together a lot it just makes sense that they’re getting a lot of play on my feed both professionally and personally.
And then there’s some people in my life who either aren’t on Instagram altogether or don’t make appearances often or at all on my feed regardless of how much time we spend together. It all goes back to what I said earlier about keeping parts of my private life sacred.
Do you have any rules about being on your phone for social media when you are with other people?
Rebekah Peppler: Yes, definitely. I don’t like to be on my phone constantly when I’m with people I love. I like to give my full attention to someone and feel connected with them on tangible level. That said, I kind of love posting on Instagram when I’m with friends—especially those in the industry. It’s a bonding experience in itself to take, you know, 5 or 10 minutes and figure out what we need to do, talk about it a little, do it and then turn back to real life. For example, my close friend and amazing video journalist Katie Quinn ( @qkatie ) and I met up for coffee the other day in Brooklyn. We were going to yoga afterwards and on our walk to the studio, we decided to Instagram at the same time. We kind of had this lovely moment of editing the photo, showing it to the other person, offering advice and talking about it. So it became a bonding moment in and of itself. But then we put our phones down and kept on with our sweet morning date.
