At PRIOR, we have endless admiration—and endless gratitude—for Andrea Gentl and Marty Hyers, the expert pair behind Gentl and Hyers travel and food photography. It was they who shot our first-ever trip to India as a company, and in many ways they helped put into tangible form the vision of the way PRIOR wanted to do travel differently. You might say our community would never have been the same without their contributions.
Today we keep close touch with Andrea and Marty, their deep-dive approach to cultural travel an ongoing—and until this recent pause, omnipresent—inspiration and joy to follow. Besides having set an absolute bar for how photography can communicate what’s precious about a culture, they’re also two of the most thoughtful and down to earth people on the planet who know how to not just fully see a place and its people, but how to capture it.
The three of us connected by phone from our respective homes to discuss the global pause in travel due to coronavirus. We touched on personal travel style (theirs: start at the local market and talk to everyone you find) and their matchless collection of edible souvenirs they’ve carried home from journeys. But most pertinently, a chillingly on-point takeaway came through: that to engage with others through travel is a treasure that can and should never again be taken for granted.
Where are you grounded during the stay at home effort? What have you been up to?
M: We’re in the Catskills in upstate New York. We have a very tiny little farmhouse in the woods we’ve had for about 20 years. We’re here with our kids: Lula, who’s 22, and Sam, who’s 21. Our daily routine right now is based around working outside and cooking. Homesteading probably best describes it. These last two weeks, we tapped five maples, and collected about 50 gallons of sap and boiled it down to 1 gallon of syrup. We are foraging for wild foods—ramps are starting to poke through the forest floor. I ordered do-it-yourself mushroom kits, so that project has taken over the living room. We haven’t spent this much time together as a family in years and definitely not up here. It’s very grounding to be together in this time.
M: Also Andrea has collected so much from [our travels] in terms of pantry staples, like spices from India, and jaggery, lots of things we probably should never have been able to get past TSA. So now she’s organized them into jars and we’re also labeling them.
A: We’re digging into our foreign larder and making lots of comfort foods, like dosas, idlis, risottos, ragus.
Which passion came first for you: the food photography or travel photography?
