Alton Brown's Next Cookbook Will Be Photographed Entirely Via iPhone

Alton Brown's next cookbook, Alton Brown: Every Day Cook, will cater to, and is a direct product of, the social media era and the millennials who dominate it, in one very particular stylistic choice — the whole thing will be photographed on an iPhone.

The choice to forgo a traditional photography setup was due to his appreciation for the iPhone as "the visual tool of our age," Brown told the Eater Upsell podcast. And Brown, who constantly employed clever tech and hardware tricks to find the science of good food on Good Eats, knows his audience — "the Instagram crowd."

"I wanted to come up with a visual language that was more immediate, Brown said. "I'm making a book for the Instagram crowd, you know, and so why not use that tool? Why use fancy cameras and fancy lenses if I can use a tool, and find a new way to take advantage of that tool, and do what it's really good at, and stay away from the things that it isn't very good at.

"Then a whole kind of new visual thing comes out of that, and I like defining work sometimes by the tools. Instead of deciding on a style and finding the tools for it, I'll pick up a tool and say, "Okay, well, I'm intrigued by the tool. Let's style for it." So the iPhone seems to be the perfect thing to do. [That's] on top of the fact that nobody's ever done it — another good reason, at least to try it."

In addition to the overall more personal approach to photography — all of which will be done by a real photographer, the book itself will be a compilation of recipes that Brown himself regularly cooks and eats.

Alton Brown, Every Day Cook will be available in fall 2016.