Between the years 2015 to 2019, I was part of a duo with one of my best friends, Alison Page—also a fellow photographer. Prior to 2015, I had already been working fairly steadily as a freelance food photographer, though I was still very much in the early stages of my career: bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and way undercharging, haha! From 2012 to 2015, I operated as a solo photographer under the studio name 'Flattened to Fit Paper'. When Alison and I decided to combine our resources, we also combined our names to form the moniker 'Page + Paper' (for 'Alison Page' and 'Flattened to Fit Paper').

We eventually dissolved the partnership in 2019 to pursue very different paths. Alison took some time off to raise her first child (she is now a mother of two!) and to focus on building an ever-changing visual catalogue for her husband's family-owned craft brewery. I, on the other hand, took a year off from any major commercial work to hone in on my skills, try out other avenues of creative expression (this is during the time I worked as a florist at my dear friends' studio for a bit), and rediscover a style that is entirely my own—a style outside of the duo.

I then re-emerged in January of 2020 as a solo artist and photographer, and was just starting to market my photo-based services again when the pandemic happened. Restaurants closed, cookbooks were not in production as much, and budgets were slashed, so I was left without any prospective new clients during that time period. For someone who was not making much photo work during her year-long sabbatical from commercial work, only to now re-emerge at the height of the pandemic... it was a rough go. Still, 2020 ended up becoming my most prolific year since 2017. I spent many days indoors with my lighting equipment perpetually set up, and just made images for me. There were many failed experiments, many unsuccessful images... but I also walked away from that year with some of my most favourite images to date.

Below is a selection of photographs Alison and I worked on during the Page + Paper years. These images are from a cookbook we have done, several magazines, interesting outtakes from commercial shoots, and our joint self-published magazine project. I look at these times fondly. We grew together, we learned together, and we made incredible images—images that were visually and stylistically ahead of what one typically saw in Vancouver-based editorials. Back then, our peers hardly ever worked with studio light, nor styled vignettes using handmade ceramics or objects that the layman, at times, would consider garbage (like tile samples or scrap pieces of cellophane). I strongly believe Alison and I were among the few Vancouver-based creatives who pioneered this kind of conceptual thinking in our city. Those kinds of images only made the rounds in high-art European publications or in cities like New York and Los Angeles. We devoured—and were highly influenced by—contemporary publications like Gourmand, Gather Journal, and Octopian. In a lot of ways, we were treading new ground here in Vancouver by studying the work of art-forward photographers and stylists, distilling what we have processed from the material we devoured, and then injecting the aspects we found oddly beautiful and dynamic into our own images, but with an Issha-and-Alison spin.