As the world gets faster and more efficient, real craft struggles to survive — it gets quietly replaced by mass production, standardized ingredients, machines doing what hands used to do. A croissant is a small, everyday example of this: something we so easily accept without thinking about how it's actually made — how many hours of lamination, how much butter, how much patience it takes to fold and rest and fold again.
So a while back, I set out to visit every bakery in Zürich, one by one, collecting a croissant from each and photographing it as its own portrait. Not to rank them, but to notice them — to treat every baker like an artist, each one shaping something slightly different: their own curve and their own signature. It became less about the croissant itself, and more about honoring the people who still choose to do things the traditional way, even when it would be easier not to.
Now I've done the same thing in Tallinn, my second home. I wasn't sure what to expect — Tallinn is a much smaller city than Zürich — but I was genuinely pleasantly surprised to find just how many bakeries here are still making croissants completely by hand.
The point was never to compare or decide which one is "best." It's the opposite — to celebrate just how different they all can be, and how many genuinely great croissants are quietly being made across this city. I've deliberately left the bakery names out of it. No brand, no tags, no ranking — just the croissants themselves, so people can look at the shapes and textures without any influence of a name behind them. And yet, if you know Tallinn's bakeries well, you might still recognize a few — every one of them has such a distinctive style. Some finished with a scatter of flaky salt, some curled into a playful little tail, some laminated with a completely different rhythm than the others.
This project is, at its core, about slowing down enough to notice the art and craft that's already around us — and letting it speak for itself.
This project will be soon exhibited in Tallinn
by the end of September 2026
To get more information please write me about your interest alinabirjuk@gmail.com