BBQ&A: Confessions of a BBQ Photographer
Ben Sassani talks photography, BBQ, culture, embarrassing stories, and much more.
Ben Sassani is a Houston-based photographer who specializes in BBQ, food, portrait, events, and night sky photography. He is also the creative force behind BBQ Confessional, a photo and video project with the aim of telling untold stories from the BBQ community otherwise not heard by folks outside of BBQ.
We recently had the opportunity to chat with Ben about his photography, his love for the BBQ scene and West Texas landscapes, and what he hopes to share with BBQ Confessional.
The conversation below has been edited lightly for clarity.
The Smoke Sheet: Did you grow up eating Texas BBQ?
Ben Sassani: Yeah, I guess I did. But I mean, not to the extent of what everybody knows today. There was no craziness. I think the extent of it for me when I was younger was hanging out with friends to go to Bill Miller's and then Rudy’s. I still love Rudy's, and I will defend Rudy's because they're the most consistent commercial barbecue place. You go to every spot, and it is the same.
TSS: How did you first become involved in the BBQ scene?
BS: I had a little side project back in the day, and I was doing pictures of chefs in their homes. Shooting what they cook, what they do, what they eat, how they interact with families, and everything. It was fun but was just a little too time-consuming, and it was getting to a point where that was my only day off, and I wasn't seeing the kids. Towards the end of that, I met Will and Nicole from CorkScrew BBQ and did a shoot. They were my last shoot for that project. We became friends and that was probably 2013-ish. Then I started going to barbecue places with my cousins. Everybody was interested in what we were doing. Everybody wanted to go with us, but obviously we couldn't take 50 people with us. So I documented one of our trips. Then I registered two domains. BBQ Confessional was one of them, and BBQ Confidential was the other. I hoped to start a blog about our little tours where we go around to Snow's BBQ, to Truth BBQ, to Louie Mueller's, and all these other places. Things really picked up around 2014.
TSS: How did you get into photography originally, and is that your full-time job?
BS: Right before my son was born, when my wife was pregnant, I was like, I'm just gonna buy a camera because I didn't want my kids to have the crappy pictures that other people took. Especially with cell phones coming up around that time. This was late 2007 or early 2008 when the iPhone was introduced. People were taking more pictures. It’s not what it is now. I just wanted them to have good pictures. About six months into it, a friend who was shooting weddings at the time asked me to help shoot a wedding. So I went and shot it with him. I was like, “Oh, this is not that bad.” I shot a couple more weddings and then got into cultural weddings, you know, big, big weddings. It was getting tiring because all these cultural weddings are long days or long weeks. I would get hired for three to six days from anywhere from 15 to 30 hours of coverage. And you know, and as soon as I was done, my entire body hurt to where I just laid on the couch the entire time just watching TV. … So now these days, I do portraits, I do headshots, I do corporate events, things that are easy. And I can knock them out in like a day and a half. I think one wedding I shot back in 2016, I had 50,000 pictures that I had to go through for six days. 50,000 pictures. That's a lot. So that's kind of the journey that I took with photography. I don't wanna say I’m 100% full-time photographer.
TSS: What inspired you to create BBQ Confessional?
BS: I kept hearing stories. You know, you hear stories at a barbecue. The closer you get to people, you hear all these stories … everybody's telling stories. So I was like, I want to do something other than just my regular photography stuff. So I decided to start a new Instagram account.
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