National Pickle Day and a Memory From Budapest
Today is National Pickle Day, and it reminded me of something unexpected I learned in 2013 while working in Budapest as the stills photographer on a feature film. Our cinematographer was Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the most influential visual artists to ever stand behind a camera.
Vilmos had the résumé to prove it: McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Deliverance, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (for which he won the Academy Award), The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and decades of work that helped define the look of modern American cinema. But what stayed with me most wasn’t only his talent, it was his discipline, his energy, and his belief in the small rituals that kept him going.
Vilmos told me he attributed his health and longevity to eating eight pickles a day. He wasn’t joking. At 82, he was on set long before anyone else arrived and still there long after we wrapped. Rain, cold, night shoots, he never slowed. The pickles, he said, were his secret. Maybe he was right.
So for National Pickle Day, I photographed this pile of deli pickles on my usual black background; simple, direct, and exactly the way they come out of the jar or bag. Nothing styled, nothing staged. It felt fitting. Pickles, after all, were part of what kept a legend of cinema going strong.
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