Is there anything more agonising than writing about yourself? I’ve known Hilary Burden since we worked together on Vogue Australia, she as a writer, me as art editor. Naturally, I got her to write this instead.

People’s bookshelves are a dead giveaway. Lisa has one in her kitchen stacked floor to ceiling with cookbooks – many that she’s photographed herself as one of the world’s best food photographers. She’ll squirm at me saying that, but in my book she is. While her lounge room shelves are homes for exquisitely produced large format travel books, juxtaposed with framed portraits of people Lisa has photographed all over the world.

As friends who worked on and off together over many years, we’ve sipped 100-year-old cognac in Grande Champagne, blissed out on pot stickers in a Killcare bistro, and stewed venison over a fire on a wild Tasmanian beach. Visiting Lisa in London has always meant dining at London’s best restaurants – Peter Gordon’s The Providores in Marylebone was always a favourite destination to plot book and feature ideas (how we cried when it closed after 18 years), and, most recently, Jeremy Lee’s private club in Soho. 


I’ve always thought Lisa knows how to make the world’s best chefs look good, and food look more than what it is. She has a way of making each ingredient stand out just the way a chef would want it; she knows how to make the taste-buds reverberate, and food (in all its guises) painterly. Like any true master, she makes it look simple: egg white on a whisk looks ridiculously seductive, and the sinuous arc of a rhubarb stick that is so perfect it could have been the first one ever grown.

I watched Lisa hone her skills in Sydney, inspired by Vogue Entertaining Guide (a foodie mag before the word was even invented). As a dual national, coming from Hampstead where she was born and has lived most of her life, Lisa saw Australians had a thirst for new, innovative food coming from Europe. “Ironically, the tables have turned. Now Sydney is one of my favourite foodie destinations,” she says.

Most of all, time spent with Lisa involves a celebration of people and cooking. Cookbooks get pulled off the shelves and strewn over the table where recipes are pored over and chosen for dinner parties with friends. Her two sons – brought up on great food – might help crimp a ravioli or improve a sauce. But before Lisa cooks, she shops. Always fresh, usually organic. She’ll zip from fishmonger to fromagerie to get the exact ingredient of the right quality.

Food – eating it, cooking it, and travelling for it – has always been an integral part of Lisa’s way of life, first observed watching her father, a charismatic Mayfair restaurateur, travelling to source new ideas to bring back to London. “To me food has to look like you want to eat it off the page. It is hugely important to capture it fresh, not over fussed or worked to death.”

Lisa is herself an excellent cook, so if you think her images seem to hold the intimate promise of what happens next, it’s because she knows instinctively. As a photographer, Lisa has mastered the art of being in the right place at the right time, sometimes maybe a little too well, getting under the feet of perfectionist Michel Roux. When she photographed his book The Essence of French Cooking, Michel described them both as “two perfectionists whose first encounter produced photographs that leave me full of admiration”. For Lisa, “You had to raise your game not to let the great man down!”

Lisa Linder is at heart a traveller with great taste who makes grand views look intimate. She'll stop to photograph a man on a donkey in the hills of Provence, or, pull up in the middle of the road to capture the light on an avenue of autumn leaves. She says she’s always loved the long distance landscape: “It’s the Australian in me.”

Hilary Burden – author