FLASHING

Once again I’ve been thinking about food photography, which also of course includes drink.  It seems, in many ways, that it could be a very difficult and frustrating profession, but the only food photographer I know, of any sort, Anne Fishbein who and as far as I can tell is a perfectly happy woman, and takes photographs like this, which are great:

As discussed passim on this blog, most photographers of any sort, have at one time or another taken photographs of food and drink, not least William Eggleston, although his photographs always seem to be about something other than food and drink, which is obviously a very good thing.

And I was indulging my Eggleston obsession the other day and came across an article and interview in Vanity Fair by John Heilpern from November 2015, titled “Does William Eggleston Love Women? You’re Damn Right!”  I really don’t know how many ironies there are in that headline. Anyway, at the end of the interview Heilpern asks if he can take a picture of Eggleston on his cellphone.The article runs:     

“‘Go ahead,’ he obliged. I took three of him. Then he sportingly offered to take a cellphone shot of me, although he confessed he didn’t know how. After a little explanation, he figured out my cellphone’s push button and took one picture, scarcely glancing through the lens.   

“The difference was laughable. Mine were just the usual snapshots, while his was a single, masterly composition of someone seated amid the day-for-night kitsch of El Quijote. He’s a magic man, that’s for sure.”

Well yes, Eggleston is a magic man, but I still don’t quite know why so many of his interviews seem to involve El Quijote – a slightly grim Spanish restaurant next to the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan.

         

Hold these thoughts. Last Friday I went out with Jason Oddy, a man who seems as far from being a food photographer as is possible.  But he told me that Eggleston was one of his great heroes, and it was seeing photographs by Eggleston, more than any others, that made him want to take photographs. Oddy generally takes photographs like this:

         

We were having an art and food night. We started out at Mosaic House in Earls Court at an exhibition by the Persian artist Behjat Sadr (1924-2007), titled Dusted Waters.  There was a DJ set by her grandson.  Her work looks like this:

There was wine to be had at the Mosaic Rooms, and afterwards we rolled out into the night and thought it would be only appropriate to go to a Persian restaurant and we ended up in Apadana, in Kensington High Street, which has been there since pre-revolutionay days. It was founded in 1967.  So obviously there was wine there too.

It was a decent enough place - we had the hot mezza sampler, spicy Koobideh, and seabass.

And I’m no fool, I don’t brandish my camera when “real” photographers are around, but I asked Jason to take some photographs, and he did, and everything looked great – better than I’d have taken (obviously) and better than it actually appeared in “reality.” There was also this fellow in the restaurant:

The next day I looked up another article about Eggleston, this one by Augusten Burroughs, from The New York Times Style Magazine, dated October, 2016. The title of the article was “William Eggleston, the Pioneer of Color Photography” – I can imagine more banal titles, but not easily.

And the end of the article runs, “We leave the offices of the Eggleston Trust and go to his apartment. The first thing one sees upon entering is a bright red plastic sign with a yellow border, printed with capitalized white sans-serif text. It warns, “THE OCCUPANT OF THIS APARTMENT WAS RECENTLY HOSPITALIZED FOR COMPLICATIONS DUE TO ALCOHOL. HE IS ON A MEDICALLY PRESCRIBED DAILY PORTION OF ALCOHOL. IF YOU BRING ADDITIONAL ALCOHOL INTO THIS APARTMENT YOU ARE PLACING HIM IN MORTAL DANGER. YOUR ENTRY AND EXIT INTO THIS APARTMENT IS BEING RECORDED. WE WILL PROSECUTE SHOULD THIS NOTICE BE IGNORED. THE EGGLESTON FAMILY.”

Both Augusten Burroughs and I find ourselves wondering where exactly you find a doctor who prescribes a “daily portion of alcohol,” and what exactly is the dosage.  It wouldn’t happen in Tehran, I’m sure.

IT'S FOOD (BUT IS IT ART?)

Food photography, it’s a funny old thing isn’t it?

      Here’s a rather wonderful picture of the “Housemade Potato Chips - gorgonzola and calabrian chili dip, parmesan, black pepper” at Stella Barra Pizzeria on Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles.

I didn’t take that picture, although I was there, and I did eat some of the chips.  It was taken by Lisa Jane Persky who’s a "proper" and very accomplished photographer.  And I know that if I’d taken took a picture of those chips, they just wouldn’t have looked that good.

Here is what photographer Ellen Auerbach had to say on the subject: 

And here’s one I did earlier, when I was trying to become the “Cheese and pickle doostep sandwich” at The Royal Oak Inn, in Woodchester, Gloucestershire in England.  I guess I failed in my becoming.  On balance I think that was probably for the best.

A SLAP UP FOR THE EYES

I’ve been thinking again about food and photography.  Taking pictures of food used to be a highly specialized skill, and now every Tom, Dick and Shirley with a cell phone does it.

There was a glorious moment in my career as a jobbing hack when I went up to Yorkshire to talk to a soup maker (Yorkshire Provender) for the Daily Telegraph.  It took all day, and a photographer and his food stylist were there all the time I was.  And when I’d finally had enough – at about six in the evening, having been discussing soup for 8 hours or so - the photographer was still hard at it, arranging elegant soup bowls, swirls of cream, and sprigs of chervil.  I admired his focus.

This is one of the pics from Provender’s current website, though it wasn’t taken on that day.

And so to my friend Jason Oddy.  He usually takes photographs that look like the one below; it’s part of Mentouri University, in Constantine, Algeria, 2013, from a series titled “Concrete Spring.”

I happened to have dinner with him in London in a Turkish restaurant called Yasar’s, in Blackhorse Road, in Walthamstow.  And since he had his phone with him, and since he was the professional photographer, I asked him to take a picture of the kebabs we were eating.  It came out looking austere, simple without being exactly minimalist, and definitely architectural; very much like a Jason Oddy photograph in fact. I think that’s a good thing.

BOURDAIN, HOMME AND QUINE AND HARRIET AND PAPPY (RIP)

I’ve been reading an interview Anthony Bourdain did for Yahoo TV.  One of the questions:  What do you think of people who Instagram their food?  Bourdain replies, “Look, I'm guilty of it, too. I think it's worth making fun of. We deserve to be mocked. It's a dysfunctional, even aggressive practice. Why do we Instagram pictures of our food? It's not to share. It's to make other people feel really bad. … It's basically a f--- you. You say, "Look what I'm eating, bitches." You don't want people to be eating dinner with you when you Instagram a picture of your food. You want them to be eating a bag of Cheetos on their couch in their underpants. It's a passive aggressive act.  That said, I do it all the time.”

I’d have thought Bourdain was way too cool to do Instagramming (even I feel like a tool when I photograph my meals) and I’d also think he’s too cool to do passive aggression.  Why not active aggression?  But I guess it’s all publicity to further his “brand.”  And hell, it’s not such a bad brand.

I went and looked at his Instagrams – some very enticing pics with some very terse titles, such as Lobster Night:

 Lunch Sicily:

The Glory of Spain:

And the one below has no caption at all but seems to be in South Africa. Pap Beef Curry – pardon my immature snigger:

I cut Bourdain plenty of slack for two, linked, reasons.    First, he knows a good guitarist when he hears one.  In an interview with Karen Brown for Etsy.com she asks him: If you could bring back four dead rock stars, who would you bring back?  After Johnny Thunders, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Joey Ramone – he goes for Robert Quine.  Robert Quine!!  All right!! – the only truly great bald guitarist or at least the only one who ever seriously fessed up to his baldness.  Brian Eno writes of him,” Our friendship clicked and resolved itself around the following: a love of wandering round New York and eating in obscure oriental restaurants” also of course “a feeling for music that was 'at the edge of music.'”

Bourdain is also a fan of the desert – he’s done at least two shows about the Mojave, and in one of them he and Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age go to eat and drink at Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown, a place I know somewhat, and a place I became aware of because of that other great guitarist and desert guy Howe Gelb, who used to live close by, though this pic is obviously taken in Arizona.

And here are Bourdian and Homme at the bar of Pappy and Harriet's, where I have frequently sat.

 I think Bourdain rather overstates the desert weirdness of Pappy and Harriet’s – the place is often full of kids and old couples doing line dancing, but I do believe their steak sandwich with thinly sliced Santa Maria BBQ topped with grilled onions and shredded cheese on toasted French bread  - $11.95, is pretty much unbeatable.  It’s what I always get when I’m there but I’ve never been so uncool as to take a picture of it.  Others, I’m sure have felt no such inhibition.

EGGING ON EGGLESTON

At the weekend I had a Slammin’ Slider – that was the name on the side of the food truck anyway.  My sliders contained pulled pork and were scattered with crispy fried onions – and they were just fine if you like sliders, though I'm never sure I really do.  The Loved One would have had the Philly Cheese Steak but the truck had run out of mayonnaise, which seems a slam of a different sort: she had the potato croquettes instead with a dip that may or may not have been mayo-based.  These were fine too.  I'm pretty sure I like potato croquettes better than sliders.  So why did I order sliders?  Just one more imponderable.

We were at Paris Photo L.A.; a photography fair on the Paramount Studio lot, a place I’d never set foot before, though I’d driven and walked past often enough. I was there, among other things, to gawk at William Eggleston, who was doing a signing at the Gagosian stand.  Mr. E is a famous southern dandy and drinker.  I can’t say that he looked exactly stewed at the signing but he did look pleasantly marinated.

It would be pretty darn idle and reductive to think of Eggleston as a “food photographer,” but even so, he’s taken two of the greatest pictures of food and drink I’ve ever seen  This is the first:

I’m reminded of it every time I get on a plane.  I always get a window seat if I can, and I always try to arrange my glass so that the sun might shine through it in precisely this way.  But it never quite does.  And the image seems so still, so calm, so isolated, so untroubled and unhassled, so optimistic; not the way I ever feel when I’m on a plane, but the way I always want to feel. 

The second great photograph is this one, rather more complicated in some ways, I think: 

I've seen it captioned "Sumner, Mississippi," and we know that's where Eggleston was raised on a “plantation," and I’d guess this photograph was taken there.   My first superficial impression was that here was a grand spread of southern food laid out for a feast, maybe Thanksgiving; but of course when you look even slightly more closely you see it’s a meal for one.  My friends from the South also tell me this is pretty much everyday fare down there.  I've also seen the photograph captioned "Dinner."

Even so this seems lot of trouble to go to for just one person, and it’s not just the food but the silverware and the flower arrangement.  And perhaps there’s something sad and lonely about going to all this effort when you're by yourself, something a bit Miss Haversham.   But then, maybe that’s the whole point.  Just because you’re eating along doesn’t mean you have to slouch on the couch and eat a slab of pizza. Southerners are great believers in keeping up standards.  And maybe there’s something rather noble in going to precisely this amount of trouble, in taking pleasure and delight in small things even when there’s nobody there to share them with you.  This to a large extent is what Eggleston’s work is about; and, of course, the camera is there to help in the sharing, to be an observer, and perhaps to be an honored guest at the table. 

I’m not sure that Eggleston is a big eater, and according to an interview he did with the New Yorker in 2008, he had a troubled relationship with at least one eating establishment: the Lamplighter Lounge in Memphis, from which he was banned for at least a decade.  There he is above at the Lamplighter, in a photo by Stanley Booth.  

The celebrated Miss Shirley was a bartender at the Lamplighter Lounge for the best part of four decades: she died in 2010.  The cause of Eggleston’s ban, according to that New Yorker interview: “I got really drunk one time, and I threw a hamburger at Shirley, who had just made it.”  The ban sounds fair enough to me.