Cataloguing cuisine as a work of art
The work that defines Francesc Guillamet: gathering a restaurant's complete output in a reasoned photographic catalogue. A pioneer and, so far, the only one in the world.
A catalogue raisonné is the complete, ordered inventory of an artist's entire body of work. Traditionally done for painters or sculptors. Recording, one by one, all of a restaurant's creations and ordering them as one orders a work of art.
Every gastronomic composition is ephemeral —it is eaten, it disappears. The photograph is its only enduring part: built at the moment the dish is created, it remains as its definitive representation. That all images are the work of a single photographer, with a coherent gaze, is what makes the series cross the line between craft and art. The photographic work prevails over the gastronomic one.
Gastronomic catalogues also establish an unprecedented form of collaboration with top chefs: a photographic series gathering all of a restaurant's creations across an entire era. elBulli, Disfrutar and Miramar are, so far, the only restaurants in the world to have gathered their entire work this way.
elBulli
At Cala Montjoi in Roses, the restaurant of Ferran Adrià and Juli Soler transformed world cuisine and was considered the best in the world for 4 consecutive years. Guillamet photographed the 1,846 creations of its entire creative era, gathered in eleven volumes: the most ambitious catalogue raisonné ever made of a restaurant.
Disfrutar
In Barcelona, Mateu Casañas, Oriol Castro and Eduard Xatruch —all three from elBulli— have taken Disfrutar to number one in the world. Guillamet documents the whole body of work in three volumes: Catalogue 2014–2017, 2018–2020 and 2020–2024. Each dish, an image and its recipe.
Miramar
On the seafront in Llançà, Paco Pérez runs Miramar, two Michelin stars. The restaurant's catalogue raisonné is planned in three volumes: the first already published, the second and third in preparation.
