Here’s a review I just did of The Photographer’s Cookbook, which appears on the current Los
Angeles Review of Books website. This
post has some extra photos that aren’t in LARB.
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Apertures and
Aperitifs: On “The Photographer’s Cookbook”
The Photographer’s Cookbook
Aperture/George Eastman Museum,
160 Pages
IF YOU MANAGE to get a
reservation at Sukiyabashi Jiro, the three Michelin star sushi restaurant in
Tokyo — the best in the world by many accounts — you’re expected to obey quite
a list of rules, including: “Please refrain from taking photos of the sushi. The
only sure way of enjoying Jiro’s sushi is to concentrate on dining. When you
leave, we would be pleased to take a commemorative photograph for you at the
doorway if you wish.”
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| Jiro Ono and Barack Obama |
This sounds reasonable in a good
restaurant, doesn’t it? The chef wants you to focus on what you’re eating. On
the other hand, the Japanese have the expression me de taberu (we eat
with our eyes). Admittedly this isn’t exactly the same as posting pictures of
your dinner on Instagram, but both impulses acknowledge how important the
visual element is to food and eating.
When I was, briefly, the relief
chef at a fairly dismal steak restaurant in Cambridge, England, my boss — an
unhappy man who hated his job and his customers even more than he hated me —
dispensed a piece of what he thought was profound wisdom: “If it looks good and
they’ve got a full plate, you can get away with murder.”
Let’s leave aside the question of
why you’d want to “get away with murder” when it comes to serving food, but
let’s also acknowledge that he wasn’t completely wrong. We want our food to
look good, even if our notions of what constitutes “good-looking” may change
over time. These days a full plate is more likely to seem unsophisticated, and
you could argue that photographing your food is pretty unsophisticated too, but
the ship seems to have sailed on that one. Even Anthony Bourdain now thinks
it’s okay.
As far as I know, nobody ever
took a picture of anything I cooked in that Cambridge restaurant, but I
wouldn’t have minded. And for what it’s worth, a quick look at Yelp suggests
that a lot of people don’t obey the no-photography rule at Sukiyabashi Jiro.
But why take photographs of food
anyway? As a souvenir, no doubt — photography is in the business of fixing
transient moments, and meals are always just passing through. No doubt it’s
also sometimes a way of showing off to friends about all the cool places you’ve
been to eat. Of course many “amateur” photographs of food are downright banal,
but sometimes amateurishness can be interesting in itself. I have various
Facebook friends around the world, most of whom, naturally, I scarcely know at
all, and I’m always intrigued to see the pictures they put online, showing what
they eat at home or in restaurants or at family gatherings. It tells me a lot
about the kind of lives they lead.
There is the Brillat-Savarin
model of eating: “tell me (for our purposes here, ‘show me’) what you eat and
I’ll tell you who you are.” For serious photographers a similar model applies:
show me what you think is worth photographing and that’ll tell me just as much.
And if you show me that food is an important part of your worldview and your
aesthetic, then we’re deep inside your psyche.
Once upon a time, very few
photographers got through art college without shooting pictures of red cabbages
or green peppers as a way of demonstrating their skills with lighting,
exposure, and printing. There are even some extant Robert Mapplethorpe images,
taken well post-college (he dropped out of the Pratt Institute in 1969), of a
pineapple and an aubergine, and one of a watermelon with a knife stuck in it.
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| Mapplethorpe |
The Photographer’s Cookbook — a project originally conceived by Deborah Barsel and now completed by
Lisa Hostetler — contains no Mapplethorpes, which may be considered a shame, or
it may not. If you believe Patricia Morrisroe’s biography, Mapplethorpe was in
with the “coprophagia is the final sacrament” crowd at the time this volume was
first conceived.
The book was a very long time in
the making. Back in 1977, Deborah Barsel was working as an assistant registrar
at George Eastman House (now the George Eastman Museum), which was not the
world’s most exciting job apparently. To make her life more interesting she
decided to compile a book of photographers’ recipes and food-related
photographs, and she placed an ad in the museum’s magazine Image asking
for contributions.
Somewhat to her surprise, within
two years she’d received 120 replies, but then Barsel left her job, and the
majority of the submissions sat in the archives in a box labeled “Photocookbook.”
There they stayed for the better part of 40 years until Lisa Hostetler, the
current curator of photography at the Eastman, opened up the box and edited the
contents into the book we now have: 150 pages of photographs and recipes by
high-art photographers, some of them still very famous names, others who are
less familiar now than they were in 1977. There’s also been a little slippage
over the years — some of the material was returned to the photographers — and
some new pieces have been added, but even so we have a kind of time capsule
here.
This is not the place to chart
all the many changes that have taken place in the worlds of both food and
photography in the four intervening decades; suffice it to say that the two
processes had a lot more in common before photography went digital, when
photographers mixed chemicals to their own or extant “recipes,” when it was all
about temperatures, timing, gelatins, and emulsions, when photographs could be
“dodged” and “burned.”
Some of the images here do look
as though they come from a completely different age. For instance, Ansel
Adams’s perfectly composed and beautifully lit Still Life, San Francisco,
California, ca. 1932 — two eggs, an egg slicer, a bottle of milk, another
bottle of Marie Brizard liqueur — looks like a historical artifact, the kind of
picture nobody takes anymore, and not very many people want to look at.
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| Adams |
Hans Namuth’s American
Housewife, ca. 1952, certainly looks like a period piece, set up to look as
though it’s taken from inside a fridge, peering out through shelves of cake and
macaroni salad at a wholesomely attractive woman, who may or may not be a
professional model, an image that now contains ironies that wouldn’t have been
so apparent in the early ’50s.
Other works seem amazingly
current. Neil Slavin’s Nylen’s Frankfurters in Full Dress shows a grid
of 12 hotdogs, garnished with various fruits, vegetables, pickles, and what
not. The image’s colors are lurid, and the overall effect is engagingly
satirical, as the photographer applies a conceptualist rigor to what is, after
all, just a bunch of wieners.
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| Slavin |
One photograph by Arthur Taussig,
from 1979, is downright “meta.” It shows a table strewn with books and
magazines, all of them opened at pages that show reproductions of Edward
Weston’s famous photographs of peppers.
When it comes to the recipes,
some of the photographers have taken the task far more seriously than others.
Burt Glinn’s recipe for borscht, actually his grandmother’s, is meticulously
detailed and runs to three pages. But it’s there side by side with Imogen
Cunningham’s borscht recipe, which is a very different thing altogether. First
she denounces salt, and then she denounces Alice B. Toklas’s kitchen skills —
“likely her cooking contributed to the death of Gertrude and herself” — and
then she gives her recipe: “I make it half mine and half Manischewitz
(commercial bottle of borscht).” Julia Child might be horrified, although
there’s a wonderful, very “straight,” portrait of her here by Arnold Newman, in
which she looks so benign and happy that you imagine she’d forgive even the
worst culinary sins and shortcuts.
Some seem to be trying a bit too
hard: Minor White’s recipe for steamed and sautéed vegetable with its talk of
“heightened awareness” seems a lot of trouble for a plate of carrots and
celery. Barbara Morgan gives a recipe for “Global Bread Cake,” “hoping that we
will all someday become ‘World Citizens.’” You will not be surprised to learn
that brown rice and buckwheat are involved. Others seem not to be trying very
hard at all. Do we really need Horst P. Horst to tell us how to marinate a
cucumber?
Just occasionally the
photographers seem to be simultaneously overreaching and undercooking. Les
Krims’s recipe for “Formalist Stew” “has 185 ingredients and takes 31 days to
prepare. The only problem is, you die of hunger and boredom before it’s ever
finished.” It’s accompanied by a 1974 Polaroid of his mother, topless, pouring
milk out of a dead chicken — I guess the world worried less about salmonella
back then.
Here, as in most cases, the
images don’t directly illustrate the recipes, though at their best image and
text interact and inform each other. A Robert Heinecken collage, actually from
1991, which uses magazine ads for Bombay Sapphire and tooth whitener,
accompanies a recipe for Heinecken’s “Serious Martini” — gin kept in the
freezer, no vermouth, no ice, not stirred or shaken, but poured into a glass
that’s been in the freezer, along with the juice of one eighth of a California
lemon — “This drink is not recommended before 11 a.m.” Ed Ruscha’s “Cactus
Omelette” — a more or less serviceable recipe — “have a friend bring a jar (of
napolitos) on a plane if necessary” — is accompanied by one of the cactus
photographs from his 1972 series Colored People.
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| Ruscha |
Two of the more successfully
enduring presences in the book — young Turks in 1977, grand old men today — are
William Eggleston and Stephen Shore (born 1939 and 1947, respectively), two men
who from the beginning created pictures that could all too easily be accused of
banality, or of looking like “snapshots,” whatever the hell that means. Now
their aesthetic is widely regarded as the gold standard of both high and low
photographic art.
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| Eggleston |
William Eggleston’s photograph
from the 1976 series Election Eve shows the interior of a diner where
the walls, table tops, and some of the upholstery are all the same alarming
yellow hue. It’s a great photograph, it’s pure William Eggleston, and it
captures the bleak emptiness of a certain kind of eating experience: the fact
that there’s no food in sight only adds to the misery. Eggleston provides a
recipe for “Cheese Grits Casserole” — heavy on the Velveeta.
Stephen Shore’s own photographic
contribution shows a restaurant table, post-meal, after the food and dishes
have been cleared away from the stained tablecloth, a cup of coffee and a cigar
remain, and an American Express Card sits waiting to be picked up by the
server. You could find something similar on Instagram, of course, but it
wouldn’t be a Stephen Shore.
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| Shore |
In fact Shore has embraced the
online world in a way that few photographers of his generation have. Between
2003 and 2008 he made 83 volumes of his work available in print-on-demand book
form, the contents of each book shot on a single day. That project’s over now,
but he continues to be active on Instagram, where the audience is inevitably a
mixed bunch: some in the know, some not, though all free to comment.
Occasionally someone will declare that the work is banal and in one case
complains, “This does not feel like Shore.” Where to start with that one? But
if you want to see the arugula and rugelach salad, or the mutton chop with
escarole that Shore ate and thought worth photographing, well, look no further.
Thanks to Instagram you could even ask him for the recipe.
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| Shore/Instagram |
The Photographer’s Cookbook is a fascinating curiosity, and although it’s essentially a small, fun
project, it’s rather more serious and subversive than it first appears. It
raises all kinds of questions about consumption, desire, pleasure, and domesticity,
and it whets the appetite for a very much larger work about food and
photography, one that might include advertising photography and fashion — why
is food so often used as a prop in fashion shoots while the models look like
they’ve never had a good meal in their lives? It might address the politics of
hunger with Salgado and Dorothea Lange, the nature of mortality with Nobuyoshi
Araki’s The Banquet and the heartbreaking record of what his wife ate
during her terminal illness, Martin Parr’s pictures of food, particularly
British food, dealing with class, status, and in the broadest sense, taste. The
possibilities are vast. As you see, I’ve been left hungry for more.
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The link to LARB is here:
