Chewing the Image
Online takeaway food photography is a codified genre. The usual scenes are an assortment of dishes laid out in neat constellations on dressed-up tables. The plates, often running past the limit of the frame, look to be part of an infinite offering cropped short. Despite the variety and volume of food, these photographs don’t have a gluttonous or opulent appearance, rather, in a much more vulgar way, they are consuming displays of choice.
As such, our attention is not pulled because of the subject — the stylised foodstuff — but because of the opportunity the photographs present: with so many options the perfect meal must be available, all that’s needed is our deft selection. This narrative is mirrored in the angle of the photographs too. Think of the camera, like an aerial survey, locked parallel to the terrain of tablecloths, plates, and cutlery below. Everything is visible under the bright studio lights, which is to say that nothing is hidden, it’s a disembodied god’s-eye-view that stokes a sense of power in the viewer’s choice as a consumer. As such, these displays of worldly cuisine solicit an appetite for taste, an urge for good judgement.
This genre of food photography leans on a visual language that has no tongue, so to speak. You can not convincingly imagine lancing these meals with a fork, or having them move around your mouth, or linger on your breath because you know, like every other sensible person, that they are not real in any meaningfully efficacious way: this food can not be delivered (literally). As such, by necessity, these photographs traffic in unsatisfiable wants. Consider the similar commercial logic of food photography on packages of supermarket goods. You see blankets of ham folded beneath furls of lettuce lightly clinched by thick-cut slices of wholemeal bread flanked by cherry tomatoes (which are just out of focus), or the pastry of a seasonal desert cracked open with a delicate utensil, its filling spills out over a rustic kitchen countertop towards the camera. If we believe the fine print, these are “serving suggestions”. Despite the scatter of crumbs suggesting a truth-bearing image of authenticity, or the warm glow from a kitchen in soft focus suggesting the wholesomeness of a homemade meal, to be worthwhile signs of taste these kinds of photographs depend on their own uncanny artificiality.
To take these culinary intimations further, in touristic areas of Japan it is common to find “sample food”, these are realistic plastic models of meals, from sushi to pizza. They are designed to overcome the challenge of communication — the fumbling of language — by reducing the expression of what is seen and what is wanted to basic gestures of selection: the pointed finger, the nodding head. However, despite the laborious craft to produce these life-like imitations of food, once the meals are made into “dummies” they have the license to behave unrealistically. Window displays of bowls of soup are tilted to show their contents but, of course, nothing spills over, table arrangements of iced drinks are left out in Tokyo’s summer sun but don’t melt, the crispy tempura never softens. These inedible effigies and absurd symbolisations are the unsurprising kin of contemporary takeaway food photography.
In contrast is what we may as well call baroque food photography. It gives image to the brutality of food as a thing that lives uneasily — melting, peeling, shedding, flaking, sinking, sweating, decaying. The temperamental scene easily rots, as such, we have empathy for its life and a greater bond to its verisimilitude. In this way, the scene itself is not appetising but it is tasteful. The realism of the photograph is there in the way the cheese is made uniquely cheesy, the fruit utterly fruity, and so on. This kind of photography is recovering, more than it is representing, the sensations of life. In this way, it is unlike the photographs of “serving suggestions”, takeaway food, or the plastic models, which can only ever be cheese-like, fruit-like, and so on.
The baroque photograph doesn’t need to deliver anything other than the materiality of the food itself, as a pure surface of appearance. But take note, in the baroque scene there is no juice spilling over the flesh of the fruits, no stray drips of wine bleeding into the tablecloths, there are no smears on the knives or clots jammed in the teeths of forks — the scenario is temperate (frigid). This, and more, is what makes these photographs ring false, it’s what makes the situation, no matter how banal, prick us as something other than what we know to be usual; it is just sour of the real. It’s an effect similar to Edward Weston’s food photography. His lens is brought to the subject with the expectation that it is utterly unique and, in that way, quite bizarre: the vascular drape of a cabbage’s leaf, the toned physique of a pepper’s musculature. As such, what’s photographed is considered one among many rather than an analogical representation of a kind. Unlike the photographs of takeaway food, each item on the baroque table is rendered as an independently fallible substance.
It’s testament to the success of the baroque food photograph that our imaginations do not wick across its surface towards commerce, but instead sink deeper into thicker narratives. Here, for instance, in Charlotte Doyle’s baroque-like food photography, there might be sentiments for the rural, a sure smell of damp hay moving in through small, crooked, single-glazed windows just out of frame. This is not the photographer’s intentional suggestion, rather it’s an optical allusion. Stretching further still, past the (time) frame of the photograph, you can also imagine a quiet conversation over dirty plates and glasses of wine, a murky silhouette cast on kitchen tiles as dishes are washed, a mild summer evening by an open window, the rest of the bottle on the sill. The baroque photograph is successful, as such, when it is able to nurture nature into an image of pleasure that has the viewer feel, implicitly, that they have already known this place; as if they were home.
These sentiments are also brought on by the position of the camera. Rather than being at a place removed, like in the takeaway food photographs, it feels as if they were taken from a place seated at the table, within arms reach of a diner. Consequently, not only can you imagine eating these foods, but you almost expect to clamp down on a rogue olive pit, or drop food in your lap because these photographs feed an unusual realism more than they do serve a consuming fantasy.
The takeaway food photograph is most potent in the short-lived context of trade and exchange, and as such it is dependent on recurring insatiable wants. When we do not get what we want we don’t feel good about ourselves, or others. Conversely, there is something dreamy in the baroque’s weird realism. When we are loyal to a dream that does not manifest, it endures in us beautifully as desire. For photographers, this difference may be worth remembering in times when our daily lives are most occupied by dummies, effigies, absurd symbols and an overwhelmingly mercantile logic.
As such, our attention is not pulled because of the subject — the stylised foodstuff — but because of the opportunity the photographs present: with so many options the perfect meal must be available, all that’s needed is our deft selection. This narrative is mirrored in the angle of the photographs too. Think of the camera, like an aerial survey, locked parallel to the terrain of tablecloths, plates, and cutlery below. Everything is visible under the bright studio lights, which is to say that nothing is hidden, it’s a disembodied god’s-eye-view that stokes a sense of power in the viewer’s choice as a consumer. As such, these displays of worldly cuisine solicit an appetite for taste, an urge for good judgement.
This genre of food photography leans on a visual language that has no tongue, so to speak. You can not convincingly imagine lancing these meals with a fork, or having them move around your mouth, or linger on your breath because you know, like every other sensible person, that they are not real in any meaningfully efficacious way: this food can not be delivered (literally). As such, by necessity, these photographs traffic in unsatisfiable wants. Consider the similar commercial logic of food photography on packages of supermarket goods. You see blankets of ham folded beneath furls of lettuce lightly clinched by thick-cut slices of wholemeal bread flanked by cherry tomatoes (which are just out of focus), or the pastry of a seasonal desert cracked open with a delicate utensil, its filling spills out over a rustic kitchen countertop towards the camera. If we believe the fine print, these are “serving suggestions”. Despite the scatter of crumbs suggesting a truth-bearing image of authenticity, or the warm glow from a kitchen in soft focus suggesting the wholesomeness of a homemade meal, to be worthwhile signs of taste these kinds of photographs depend on their own uncanny artificiality.
To take these culinary intimations further, in touristic areas of Japan it is common to find “sample food”, these are realistic plastic models of meals, from sushi to pizza. They are designed to overcome the challenge of communication — the fumbling of language — by reducing the expression of what is seen and what is wanted to basic gestures of selection: the pointed finger, the nodding head. However, despite the laborious craft to produce these life-like imitations of food, once the meals are made into “dummies” they have the license to behave unrealistically. Window displays of bowls of soup are tilted to show their contents but, of course, nothing spills over, table arrangements of iced drinks are left out in Tokyo’s summer sun but don’t melt, the crispy tempura never softens. These inedible effigies and absurd symbolisations are the unsurprising kin of contemporary takeaway food photography.
In contrast is what we may as well call baroque food photography. It gives image to the brutality of food as a thing that lives uneasily — melting, peeling, shedding, flaking, sinking, sweating, decaying. The temperamental scene easily rots, as such, we have empathy for its life and a greater bond to its verisimilitude. In this way, the scene itself is not appetising but it is tasteful. The realism of the photograph is there in the way the cheese is made uniquely cheesy, the fruit utterly fruity, and so on. This kind of photography is recovering, more than it is representing, the sensations of life. In this way, it is unlike the photographs of “serving suggestions”, takeaway food, or the plastic models, which can only ever be cheese-like, fruit-like, and so on.
The baroque photograph doesn’t need to deliver anything other than the materiality of the food itself, as a pure surface of appearance. But take note, in the baroque scene there is no juice spilling over the flesh of the fruits, no stray drips of wine bleeding into the tablecloths, there are no smears on the knives or clots jammed in the teeths of forks — the scenario is temperate (frigid). This, and more, is what makes these photographs ring false, it’s what makes the situation, no matter how banal, prick us as something other than what we know to be usual; it is just sour of the real. It’s an effect similar to Edward Weston’s food photography. His lens is brought to the subject with the expectation that it is utterly unique and, in that way, quite bizarre: the vascular drape of a cabbage’s leaf, the toned physique of a pepper’s musculature. As such, what’s photographed is considered one among many rather than an analogical representation of a kind. Unlike the photographs of takeaway food, each item on the baroque table is rendered as an independently fallible substance.
It’s testament to the success of the baroque food photograph that our imaginations do not wick across its surface towards commerce, but instead sink deeper into thicker narratives. Here, for instance, in Charlotte Doyle’s baroque-like food photography, there might be sentiments for the rural, a sure smell of damp hay moving in through small, crooked, single-glazed windows just out of frame. This is not the photographer’s intentional suggestion, rather it’s an optical allusion. Stretching further still, past the (time) frame of the photograph, you can also imagine a quiet conversation over dirty plates and glasses of wine, a murky silhouette cast on kitchen tiles as dishes are washed, a mild summer evening by an open window, the rest of the bottle on the sill. The baroque photograph is successful, as such, when it is able to nurture nature into an image of pleasure that has the viewer feel, implicitly, that they have already known this place; as if they were home.
These sentiments are also brought on by the position of the camera. Rather than being at a place removed, like in the takeaway food photographs, it feels as if they were taken from a place seated at the table, within arms reach of a diner. Consequently, not only can you imagine eating these foods, but you almost expect to clamp down on a rogue olive pit, or drop food in your lap because these photographs feed an unusual realism more than they do serve a consuming fantasy.
The takeaway food photograph is most potent in the short-lived context of trade and exchange, and as such it is dependent on recurring insatiable wants. When we do not get what we want we don’t feel good about ourselves, or others. Conversely, there is something dreamy in the baroque’s weird realism. When we are loyal to a dream that does not manifest, it endures in us beautifully as desire. For photographers, this difference may be worth remembering in times when our daily lives are most occupied by dummies, effigies, absurd symbols and an overwhelmingly mercantile logic.
Image courtesy of Charlotte Doyle.
