UK-based food photographer, stylist and art director Costas Millas creates a 64-page limited edition art book of conceptual food photography using only black and white subjects, hand-sewn with an exposed spine, as a deliberate act of craft in a world increasingly shaped by content and AI generation.
Costas Millas became a full-time food creative at the end of 2024 after years of balancing photography and styling with a graphic design career. The book that followed is the fullest expression of what that transition meant to him. NO COLOUR is not a portfolio. It is an argument.
The premise is elegantly constrained: every food subject in the series is either black or white, chosen with care and interpreted boldly. Within that apparent simplicity lies considerable range. “Nothing can ever truly be black and white,” Millas says, “and I wanted the work to explore the tones and shades that sit within these colours, and how that reflects our own work, our feelings, and ourselves.” The 31 conceptual food art images draw references from fashion, beauty and fine art, with the work of Yayoi Kusama, Jackson Pollock, Maria Bartuszová and Es Devlin informing a visual language that reaches well beyond the food photography context.
The book was a response to something Millas observed happening in the industry around him.
“So much of what we create as food creatives now lives online,” he says, “scrolled past instantly, generated faster and faster, increasingly by AI. I wanted to go in the opposite direction entirely. To make something time-laboured, craft-led, and built to last.”
The result is a 64-page large-format hardcover, limited to 200 signed and numbered copies, hand-sewn with a raw exposed spine in black thread. The thread was chosen to echo the meaning of the work within: the slower, more deliberate embrace of craft that the whole project represents. Millas designed, wrote and produced every element himself.
Costas Millas is a UK-based food photographer, food stylist and art director, originally from a graphic design background. Named Food and Drink Photographer 2024 at the British Photography Awards and recipient of the Food Stylist Award at the 2025 World Food Photography Awards.
Website: madebymrmillas.com Instagram: @madebymrmillas
NO COLOUR, 2025. 64-page large-format hardcover art book. Limited edition of 200, individually signed and numbered. Hand-sewn, exposed edge binding with black thread. 31 conceptual food art images, 9 incidental still life images, 16 concept sketches, 8 artist quotes. Concept, art direction, food styling, prop styling, photography, editing, text and design: Costas Millas.
