Please enter your email and website or LinkedIn to receive more information about our free and paid accounts.
Please enter your email address below and we’ll send you instructions on how to change your password.
Boston photographer Doug Levy has been a long time fan of hot sauce and has been putting Tabasco on almost every meal for more than a decade. In fact, the running joke among his friends is that he’ll put hot sauce on anything except cereal. A few months ago, he realized that even though he and his wife often have four to five various bottles open at a time, they were never going to taste all of the sauces he had accumulated over the years.
Doug’s collection had also grown quite large because a friend gifted him a six-month subscription to Fuego Box, a hot sauce of the month club which sends him three new sauces a month. Doug became selfishly motivated – he wanted to try all the sauces that were sitting on the shelf in his basement without feeling like he was wasting them all.
Besides getting to taste them all, Doug knew that people reacted differently to various levels of spice and was excited to capture the reactions. With one friend joking that ketchup is spicy and a few others ready to try a 3.5 million Scoville rated Flashbang extract (a jalapeno rates at roughly 2,000-5,000 Scoville units), Doug’s goal became to capture portraits of his friends visually representing their hot sauce reactions as they tasted various sauces.
Doug and his wife knew they wanted a party atmosphere so that they would have an audience to be able to watch everyone do their tastings. The first step was to set up their background. Because Doug does almost all of his client shoots on location, he doesn’t have a studio. Since this party was during February in New England, using his garage was out of the question. They ended up moving some furniture and taping a background to a window in their living room. Beyond that, they purchased plenty of milk and ice-cream for post-tasting relief, and his wife came up with a fabulous menu of appetizers and snacks for the day.
The Flashbang was the only sauce I purchased specifically for the shoot, and the label warns, “Less than one drop of this product is seriously hot. Flashbang hot sauce is to be used sparingly by consenting adults. Any person who consumes this product takes full responsibility for its effects, which may or may not include excessive sweating, hiccups, burning sensation on skin upon contact, vomiting and in extreme cases, loss of consciousness.”
In Doug’s case, the Flashbang sauce resulted in one of his friends getting sick, and another (the only person who tried three servings) making a late night trip to the E.R.
He said he was experiencing what he called “The worst stomach pain I’ve ever felt.” The doctors and nurses had a good laugh and sent him home with a Prilosec prescription and orders to lay off of spicy food for a few days.
The only challenge Doug faced was the size of his living room where he somehow managed to squeeze nearly 130 people. Thankfully his tasters arrived in waves, and they never had more than about 15 people in the room at one time.
The reactions to this work have been incredibly positive – many of Doug’s friends who couldn’t make it are seeing the photos and wishing they’d been able to come. Doug’s favorite part, hands down, was watching his 66-year-old mom try the Flashbang sauce after he spent ten minutes curled up on the floor after two servings of it.
Doug had also e-mailed Fuego Box thinking that they might like the series, as their sauces were what caused his collection to grow so quickly. Their founder wrote back a day later offering to send him a custom curated collection of some free sauces. With all the new fire coming his way, Doug may do another tasting at some point down the road. For now, however, he will wait to see how spicy his next collection rebuilds itself to be.
See more of Doug at douglaslevy.com.