If you follow Portland’s food scene, there’s a decent chance Em Daugherty has already influenced at least one of your dinner decisions.
She’s the woman behind Foodie Snitch, where she shares the restaurants, trips, design, food and other things around Portland and the Pacific Northwest that she thinks are worth knowing about. She also writes The Snitch List, works on creative projects with brands, shoots film, reads everything from The Odyssey to Harry Potter fan fiction and has strong feelings about creating a life built around experiences.
So we joined her after work at Yours Truly in Portland, Oregon to talk about how all of those seemingly unrelated things ended up fitting together, including where 35mm film photography fits into the experience-led life she’s built. Em picked the restaurant, we brought the film, and somehow, all three of us showed up with Holgas.
Sometimes You Just Say Yes and Buy Lunch
California-born Em found herself in a new city, a broke college student working a desk job and trying to get a feel for Portland.
While most people would simply pick things up as they went about their daily lives, Em’s creative mind came up with a much more interesting challenge:
“How do I explore Portland through things I already like?”
As luck would have it, her job gave her an opening.
One day, her boss asked if she had any food photography.
“Yes.”
She did not.
But that wasn’t going to stop her. She promptly went out, bought herself a lunch, photographed it and quickly turned that “yes” into a technically-not-a-lie-anymore.
Her boss liked the photos. Em became the restaurant reporter starting that day.
Suddenly, this small-town girl was photographing new restaurants around three times a week, and the city she’d been trying to figure out became her classroom. She was immersed in Portland’s food scene, meeting chefs and experiencing its culture, art and design from the inside.
And it changed the way she saw all of it.
Em came to see food as one of the most beautiful forms of artistic expression. Photojournalism also trained her eye in ways that still show up in her work now: composition, visual storytelling, text placement and understanding how photographs and words can work together to tell you more than either could on its own.
Eventually, all of that became Foodie Snitch.
The Foodie Snitch Origin Story, Minus the Witness Protection
According to Em, the name came straight “down from the ether.”
Em knew she wanted some sass. She also liked the idea of taking a word that sounds vaguely incriminating and turning it into something positive.
Because what does a snitch have?
Information.
Foodie Snitch was going to give you the inside scoop. Just without anyone ending up in federal custody.
It stuck.
Today, Foodie Snitch covers food, travel and lifestyle around Portland and the Pacific Northwest, and eventually that inside scoop found another home: The Snitch List, Em’s newsletter on Substack.
Interestingly, writing doesn’t come as naturally to Em as the visual side of storytelling. But as a proud Virgo, she loves that challenge. And finding ways to embrace a challenge? That part does come naturally to her.
Harry Potter Fan Fiction, The Odyssey & Other Perfectly Normal Hobbies
Spend a little time with Em and one thing becomes pretty clear: the woman is curious.
Her reading habits alone range from The Odyssey to Harry Potter fan fiction, which honestly makes for a deliciously unhinged Goodreads algorithm that we immediately wanted in on.
Her curiosity doesn’t stop at books either. She loves fashion, interiors, food (obvs), travel, photography, styling, all of it. She wants to learn more, try more and get deeper into all of it.
As a way to explore her interests, she and her photographer husband have often created fun side projects together, with Em styling scenes around things like vintage cars for him to photograph. More recently, this talent for building an entire visual world has created several opportunities with brands in the professional field.
Even The Snitch List gives her another way to follow that curiosity.
Visual expression comes naturally to Em. Writing makes her slow down, digest an experience and figure out how to put words to what she felt and why. It takes more effort and more processing, but it also lets her squeeze every ounce of life from it.
The girl simply isn’t interested in experiencing anything at mere surface level.
She describes herself as intentionally leading an experience-led life: learning more, reaching deeper, noticing things and letting herself fully feel them. Food, fashion, travel, interiors, writing, photography and styling are all different ways of doing exactly that.
The more she experiences and internalizes, the more she feels she has to offer someone else’s experience, too. That’s important to her and a life goal that’s truly commendable.
It also helps explain how a career that started with photographing her lunch has continued to grow in so many different directions.
Her 35mm Film Photography Story Starts With Seven Golden Gate Bridges
How Em Daugherty Shoots Her Everyday Life Through 35mm Film Photography
These days, Em doesn’t even own a digital camera for documenting her personal life. Her Contax G2 is basically her Hedwig at this point: rarely left behind and always bringing something home.
Portra 400 and 800 are generally reserved for special occasions, Kodak Gold comes out when there’s plenty of sun, and faster film helps her survive an Oregon winter.
She doesn’t approach every camera or every roll with the same expectations, either.
35mm film photography keeps things casual. When something feels a little more serious, she’s more likely to reach for medium format.
And sometimes she just wants to play.
Enter the Holga: wonderfully playful, occasionally unpredictable and absolutely not interested in technical perfection.
Em loves experimenting, and friends have inspired her to be more curious with self-portraits, timers and different ways of making photographs. That eagerness to experiment feels right at home in the way she approaches 35mm film photography.
Not every photograph needs to be an Important Photograph™.
Sometimes you can just make one.
The Best Part of 35mm Film Photography Comes Later
When she travels, she tends to shoot scenes rather than zeroing in on every little detail. She likes including a person in the frame, but maybe not for the reason you’d assume. A tiny figure against a massive landscape can show you what being there actually felt like in a way the landscape alone can’t.
Just enough information to remember what being there actually looked like.
And then she waits.
Getting film developed isn’t just the administrative part that happens after taking the photographs. The waiting is part of the experience.
She likes dropping off a roll and forgetting exactly what’s on it. By the time the scans arrive, enough time has passed that she’s not just looking at photographs anymore. She’s getting to experience that moment all over again.
She calls them “souvenirs from life’s experiences.”
There’s a comfort in the medium itself, too. With so much of the creative world changing at warp speed (oh, hello AI), she’s increasingly drawn to things that feel familiar, nostalgic, comfortable and most importantly, human.
Her description of film?
“It’s like going to your grandma’s house.”
And the second she said it, we understood.
I could suddenly smell my own grandma’s house. The old books, the familiar furniture, even the faded cookie tins she kept her sewing supplies in, all in their places as it had been for decades. I could picture the living room exactly as it was and remember that particular feeling of belonging somewhere, knowing that place meant something to me and was somehow a part of me, too.
Nothing in that room was particularly concerned with keeping up with the times.
And that’s exactly why you love coming back.
Your Personal Film Deserves a Professional Film Lab, Too
Three Holgas Walk Into a Restaurant...
Em Daugherty is a food and lifestyle creator, at @thefoodiesnitch for Portland and Pacific Northwest food, travel and lifestyle finds. Want more Em? Subscribe to The Snitch List for the things she thinks are worth snitching about.
Got a Holga roll? Send it our way! Also, don’t forget to tag us @photovision.co so we can see what you are creating out there in the wild!