Lunch and Other Distractions: On Susan Bright’s
Pictorial History of Food Photography
I ONCE BOUGHT lunch for the great English
photographer Martin Parr. This is not, or at least not only, a name-dropping
boast. We ate at the Pizza Express in Bristol, England. I was there
interviewing him for a magazine, and although I’d been told to take a few
snapshots to accompany the article, it never even occurred to me to photograph
him while he was eating. Even less did it occur to me to photograph what we
ate. If this happened today, I’m absolutely sure I’d try to do both. I like to
think he would too.
That lunch took place in 2002, so it’s not quite
ancient history. The internet already seemed a bit part of the culture (how
little we knew), but even the basic version of Facebook was a couple of years
away; Instagram had yet to be thought of. Nevertheless, our notions of how and
what we photographed, how and where we viewed images, and our sense of what a
photographer was or did, were already changing.
I remember Parr expressing vaguely Luddite views
about digital photography and the internet, although he told a prescient story
about being commissioned to photograph the food at some fancy New York
restaurant, the kind of place that was fully accustomed to having food
photographers around the place. They were expecting to deal with lighting
people and food stylists, but Parr arrived alone with his camera and a ring
flash, the food was set out, the pictures taken, and the job was done in 15
minutes. The restaurant staff was baffled, but for Parr it was very much
business as usual.
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| Araki |
Luddite or not, Parr, in his own work and via the
three volumes of The Photobook: A History (edited with Gerry Badger),
has helped create quite a few changes in the photography world. I’m not sure
that anyone (other than perhaps Nobuyoshi Araki) has ever photographed food
quite so relentlessly and with such attention as Parr. There are also a lot of
Parr imitators out there, who mimic the form without understanding the content.
He’s on Instagram these days too.
I mention all this because Parr’s influence looms
large over Susan Bright’s Feast for the Eyes. For one thing, his work
appears in the section labeled “1990s,” although of the eight Parr pictures
included only one actually comes from that decade. Here you’ll find his deadpan
images of British food: beans on toast, pink cakes in the shape of pigs, half a
grapefruit in a bowl on a placemat that depicts John Constable’s The Hay
Wain.
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| Parr |
The book also features photographers Parr has
championed. John Hinde, for instance (considered, possibly even by himself, to
be a humble postcard photographer), had his reputation much enhanced and
reevaluated after the publication of Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight
(2002), shepherded to life and with an introduction by Parr. Hinde’s
photographs in Feast for the Eyes are from The Small Canteen: How to
Plan and Operate Modern Meal Service, published by Empire Tea Bureau in
1947. There’s a pink and white dome of blancmange surrounded by tinned fruit,
and a pastie angled across a plate with carrots, leeks, sprouts, and roast
potatoes lined up against it in serried rows. These photographs achieve the
unlikely effect of seeming simultaneously both muted and garish. And I think
it’s fair to say that pre-Parr, these images would not have appeared in a
serious book about photography, which would have been a shame.
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| Hinde |
And who, until the arrival of The Photobook: A
History, had heard of, much less prized, the extraordinary 1903 volume The
Book of Bread? It’s a 360-page practical manual for the professional baker,
written by one Owen Simmons, containing 40 or so images of loaves, some in
color, some black and white, some tipped or pasted in, all of them life-sized.
It is a genuine wonder: as Simmons wrote himself, “However critical readers may
be, they will be forced to admit that never before have they seen such a
complete collection of prize loaves illustrated in such an excellent manner.”
(And yet he didn’t feel it necessary to mention the name of a single
photographer.) This book makes an appearance in Feast for the Eyes, and
Susan Bright also includes a companion volume, The Book of Cakes, same
author, same publisher, same format, same year, although lacking the full
minimalist splendor of the bread book.
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| Simmons |
Susan Bright obviously had quite a task on her
hands putting together a collection like this. The end result has to strike a
balance between the known and the unknown, between the totally obvious and the
willfully obscure. (And that subtitle is all-important too: this is the story —
not the history — of food in photography, although definitely not the
story of “food photography” per se.) Given that just about every photographer
who’s ever lived has taken pictures of food at one time or another, the
editor’s job is knowing what to leave out as much as what to put in. It would,
of course, be possible to compile a book many times the length of this one and
still not have exhausted the subject. By the same token, there’s the risk of
trying to be all things to all people and spreading the material too thin.
Under the circumstances, complaining about omissions may seem ungrateful, but
I’d have liked to see a couple of Andy Warhol shots in there. (Maybe that would
have killed the budget.)
And the book does cover all the important bases:
not just the photography of high art and low commerce (and it’s not always easy
to tell which is which), but also the diaristic, food in fashion, in portraits,
the highly personal and the overtly political, the erotic, even — in the case
of Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy — food in performance art.
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| Schneeman |
Inevitably, and necessarily, the book contains many
of the usual subjects, beginning with William Henry Fox Talbot’s A Fruit
Piece (1845), a still life with wicker baskets, peaches, and a pineapple.
We move on rapidly through Roger Fenton, Man Ray, Edward Weston (that damn
close-up of a green pepper again), Imogen Cunningham, Stephen Shore, and
William Eggleston, via Helmut Newton’s image of Jerry Hall rubbing a raw steak
into her eye, past various luridly illustrated cookbooks, a photograph of a
1960 lunch counter sit-in in Raleigh, North Carolina, and an image from Cindy
Sherman’s Disaster series Untitled #175 showing a mess of food on the
floor and the artist visible, reflected in the lens of a discarded pair of
sunglasses.
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| Unknown photographer |
Here are Vik Muniz’s portraits of Che Guevara
“painted” in black bean soup, and his double Mona Lisa in peanut butter
and jelly. There’s a photograph by Weegee of a children’s birthday party that
looks as grim as any of his crime scenes.
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| Weegee |
There’s Ed Ruscha’s Spam cans, Sophie
Calle’s The Chromatic Diet (meals with a different, unified color scheme
for different days of the week), and Araki’s heartbreaking The Banquet —
the photographic record of the last meals he and his dying wife Yoko ate
together, until she wasn’t able to eat at all. There are also a great many
lesser-known photographers and images.
Women are, perhaps inevitably, underrepresented in
the first half of the book. The earliest picture here taken by a woman is
Florence Henri’s still life Composition Abstraite from 1929, involving
an apple, a couple of lemons, and some mirrors. Susan Bright tells us, rather
dispiritingly it seems to me, that “[h]er interest in these fruits is purely in
their form.”
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| Henri |
Things pick up after that. You’ll find Sandy Skoglund’s
gorgeous arrangements of simple food items against saturated colored
backgrounds. Some slices of luncheon meat on a yellow counter top that has the
same patterns running through it as the meat does is especially startling.
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| Skoglund |
There are a couple of photographs from Susan Meiselas’s book Nicaragua,
showing the significance of food during wartime. Rinko Kawauchi’s mysterious
and ethereal close-ups of sometimes barely recognizable food items are among
the most haunting in the book; the photographs on her blog are much more down
to earth.
There are some unexpected but very welcome
inclusions such as William H. Martin’s “tall-tale” postcards from the first
decade of the 20th century using photomontage to depict fruits and vegetables
at hundreds of times their actual size, a jokey symbol of American prosperity
and productivity.
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| Martin |
Paul Outerbridge (best known to most of us for his
fetishistic nudes) is represented by some amazing advertising shots he did for
the A&P supermarket chain in the 1940s: in one of them we see men, distant
precursors of Don Draper, so comfortable in their masculinity that they can sit
around the kitchen drinking coffee (just like housewives!) — one of them is
even wearing an apron.
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| Outerbridge |
And there’s one color image that’s an absolute
revelation — actually a “chromolithographic print,” titled Poularde à la
Godard, from a cookery book, Le Livre de Cuisine by Jules Gouffé —
showing an arrangement of chickens, with coxcombs and truffles. It looks as
though it might have come straight out of Salvador Dalí’s Les Dîners de Gala,
but in fact it precedes that volume by a good 100 years, dating from 1869.
I’ve never been altogether convinced that a picture
is worth a thousand words, and obviously Susan Bright isn’t either. It all
depends on the picture. Some photographs speak for themselves, some don’t. I’m
very glad to have Bright’s text locate Nickolas Muray’s place in the history of
magazines and the history of photographic technique: I’m even more grateful for
the pictures. I’m rather less grateful to be told with reference to Schneemann
and her crew rolling around semi-clad in raw meat, that “such behavior is far
removed from the implicit values and controlled food spreads laid down by
cookbooks such as Betty Crocker’s?” You don’t say.
When things work best, the reader enters into a
healthy dialogue with the author. Susan Bright finds “sheer disgustingness” in
the images on the Weight Watchers recipe cards from the 1970s, which I don’t at
all. Now, why should I be? Is it about the food itself or about its depiction?
On the other hand, she finds Irving Penn’s photograph of a runny Camembert with
an ant on it to be a “masterpiece of understatement,” whereas I find it kind of
creepy, if also a knowing reference to Dalí’s soft clocks.
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| Penn |
Knowing references tend to pop up in the later work
seen here — Bright finds echoes of Matisse and Cézanne in a photograph of a
pineapple by Daniel Gordon — and perhaps this demonstrates the struggle
contemporary photographers can have between presenting food in interesting and
original ways, as opposed to trying too hard. One of Sian Bonnell’s images from
her book Everyday Dada depicts a toilet and sink pedestal surrounded by
fried eggs, and strikes me as just plain silly. By contrast, Sarah Lucas’s Self-Portrait
with Fried Eggs — a couple of sunny-side ups on her chest standing in for
breasts and nipples — seems challenging, fierce, and possibly (but not
definitely) playful, which has a lot to do with Lucas’s facial expression, also
challenging, fierce, and possibly (but not definitely) playful.
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| Lucas |
The last few pages of the book feature
photographers new to me, like Lorenzo Vitturi, whose book Dalston Anatomy
features food bought in the Ridley Road Market in East London and arranged into
sculptures — lamb trotters and taro root coated in bright pink cassava powder,
for instance. And Joseph Maida’s photographs are all about queerness,
apparently: one of them features sardines stuck into the center of doughnuts.
Really.
If nothing else, these images remind us that the
journey from Classical to Romantic to Mannerist to kitsch is a circuitous one
that regularly backtracks on itself. If you want to see some really over-the-top
food photography, take a peep in Visual Feast: Contemporary Food Staging and
Photography, published by Gestalten — opening line of the introduction:
“The diverse landscape of contemporary food culture is a rich frontier for the
creatives working within it.”
Susan Bright’s text escapes that sort of nonsense,
but there were areas where I was unsure about the book’s intended audience. On
the one hand, it’s a beautifully produced coffee-table book; on the other, the
text deals in matters of patriarchy, culinary imperialism, identity, racial
politics, and whatnot. There are also a couple of places where I think she’s
way off beam. She tells us that the writers of the Time Life Foods of the
World series “attempted to make sense of other countries’ food and culture
without inviting people from other countries to contribute.” Now I don’t own
the complete set, but the ones I have at hand — Japan, Germany, Russia, the
British Isles — all contain significant contributions from writers and/or
consultants from the respective countries. Elsewhere she says that Martin Parr
“simply wants to make a good picture” which strikes me as simply meaningless.
Still, if this is only to say that there are a great many different stories to
be told about food in photography, the one told in Feast for the Eyes is
generally a very persuasive and, above all, celebratory one.
And here’s another, final, food and
photography story of my own: Martin Parr once bought me dinner, or at least his
gallery did. It was the night of an exhibition opening, just a few weeks after
I interviewed him and bought him lunch in Bristol. I can tell you exactly what
we ate, because there was a specially printed souvenir menu, which I’ve kept.
Therefore I know we were offered tomato and chili soup, teriyaki salmon, and
coconut tart. Again, neither I nor anyone else took any pictures of the food.
But Martin Parr did sign the menu for me, with a cryptic message that still
puzzles me: “This is a waste of printing.”
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