Tessa Traeger in-conversation with William Feaver

Tessa Traeger is one of the outstanding still-life photographers of her generation and is widely acknowledged as having raised the subject of photographic, food still-life to the status of art. She trained at Guildford School of Photography and Fine Art and is especially known for her still-life photographs taken on large format cameras many of which were published during her long association with British Vogue. She has exhibited regularly since 1978 in Paris, London and New York and her work is represented in the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliotheque National in Paris and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2003 she photographed the leading British horticulturists of the day and their inspirational gardens, resulting in an acclaimed exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and a book, A Gardeners's Labyrinth. Over the last fifteen years she has been working in the mountainous Ardeche region of Southern France to record and celebrate the life of the people who live there and the food they produce culminating in the book Voices of the Vivarais and a solo exhibition at the Purdy Hicks Gallery in 2010.