shoot and eat!

by Jasmina Trifoni

I admit that when I’m at a restaurant, I find it somewhat irritating when one of my fellow diners photographs their food. Even worse is when they ask to photograph mine before I have, so to speak, ruined the composition with the first forkful. I know I’m in the minority. According to an international survey, 69% of people photograph what they are about to eat—whether it is a dish prepared by a Michelin-starred chef, their grandmother or themselves, breakfast, pizza or ice cream. And most of them share those pictures on Instagram and other social media platforms, so much so that #food is among the three most widely used hashtags on the web.

Not to mention the one I find even more irritating: #foodporn. The term was coined as far back as 1984 by American feminist author Rosalind Coward, and was itself derived from the similar “gastroporn,” first introduced by her fellow American, journalist Alexander Cockburn. In a 1977 article for The New York Review of Books, he used it to describe the vividly colourful photographs accompanying recipes in cookbooks and food magazines—images with an almost erotic power to make the act of preparing and presenting food exciting.

Endless words could be devoted to describing, even from a purely visual perspective, the powerful Einsteinian equation between food and sex. One could equally summarise the countless psychological and social-psychological studies that now go so far as to define the habit of photographing food and sharing it on social media as a form of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. This was brilliantly and humorously portrayed a decade ago in IKEA’s hugely popular “Let’s Relax” advertising campaign, which poked fun at a group of people who, as soon as their dishes arrived at the table, stopped their conversation to rearrange the cutlery, adjust the lighting and take perfect photographs to post on social media—forgetting to enjoy both the meal and one another’s company.

One could also list the books and online tutorials teaching aspiring food influencers how to create eye-catching images, or dwell on the business of food photography, particularly online, where photographs taken by users—or, perhaps more accurately, customers—can go viral and make the fortunes of restaurants, fast-food outlets, ice-cream parlours and countless other businesses.

But if today everyone, aided by filters and even AI, is—or believes themselves to be—a perfect food photographer, it seems more appropriate here to remember that photographing food is a serious profession, one that cannot simply be improvised, and to trace its history from the earliest days of photography to the present.

The first photograph of food ever taken dates from 1845, just six years after the birth of the photographic medium, and depicts two baskets containing peaches and a pineapple. Its creator, the English photographer William Henry Fox Talbot, had clearly borrowed the composition from painted still lifes. For many years afterwards, food photography remained essentially artistic in purpose, with food primarily serving as a symbol of concepts such as abundance and fertility.

The transition from the ethereal world of art—where food photography still plays a role today, albeit in a very different way—to everyday life came much later, in the mid-1940s, with the early development of colour photography. The distinction of becoming the first commercial food photographer—as well as an excellent photographer in his own right—belongs to Hungarian-born American Nickolas Muray, who was commissioned by the popular homemakers’ magazine McCall’s to provide images for its recipe features.

Muray went down in history for his extraordinarily elaborate, colourful and, above all, mouth-watering photographs. He meticulously arranged his subjects and employed inventive technical tricks: among other things, he sprayed food with hairspray or painted it with a brush, making it irresistibly desirable—and decidedly inedible.

Every stage in the history of food photography has been explored in detail in the extraordinary volume Feast for the Eyes (Aperture, 2017) by Susan Bright, writer and former photography curator at London’s National Portrait Gallery. The book deserves a place of honour in every food photographer’s library. But another milestone is worth recalling here: the emergence, in the early 1990s, of a new approach that expanded the field to include photographs of chefs, their kitchens and food both before and after preparation.

A seminal example of this new era is White Heat. A hybrid between an art book and a cookbook, it portrays English chef Marco Pierre White through Bob Carlos Clarke’s black-and-white photographs, many of them unposed and drawing on the visual language of street photography. Until then, Clarke had been best known for his nude and reportage photography.

If White Heat helped create the enduring figure of the celebrity chef, another monumental work, published in 2011, revealed the science of cooking: Modernist Cuisine. Its five volumes—History and Fundamentals, Techniques and Equipment, Animals and Plants, Ingredients and Preparations, and Plated-Dish Recipes—comprise a total of 2,438 pages and 3,700 literally explosive images.

Its creator, American Nathan Myhrvold, built a laboratory that would not look out of place at NASA and assembled a team of scientists, chefs, photographers and writers to produce an absolute masterpiece, showing us food as we had never seen it before. Unsurprisingly, popular demand led to a further work, The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, in which Myhrvold revealed—for those able to understand them—the tools and technologies used to create such extraordinary images.

Today, anything connected with food is enormously popular. One need only look at the historic centres of our cities, transformed into backdrops for tourist-oriented eating, the proliferation of cookbooks or, as already mentioned, the omnipresence of #foodporn online.

It must be said that a number of food photographers have achieved—and deserved—considerable success thanks to social media. Many of them are brought together by Foodelia, a platform that serves as both a showcase and a global community for leading food photographers and organises an annual competition dedicated to professionals specialising in food still life.

And yet the future of food photography is already here. It is a future in which the frame extends far beyond the plate, entering the landscape and the wider culture and addressing issues in which food remains central while becoming connected to politics, labour and climate change.

It is no coincidence that the World Food Photography Awards, the world’s most prestigious photography competition devoted to food, now recognises images that are a long way from those we are accustomed to seeing on social media. Among this year’s winning photographs is an image by British photographer Jo Kearney portraying an elderly woman in the dining hall of a post-Soviet sanatorium in Tajikistan. Another, entitled Bomb Spoons and taken by Mick Shippen, depicts a pile of teaspoons made in Laos from the metal of bombs dropped on the country during the Vietnam War.

Nor is it a coincidence that Yeast, the international festival dedicated to food photography taking place in Galatina, Puglia, until 8 November—in a region that is one of Italy’s major agricultural and gastronomic centres—is exhibiting photographic reportages centred on food, or rather on its absence and scarcity.

One, by photographer and Pulitzer Prize winner Saher Alghorra, explores the use of food deprivation as a weapon of war in Gaza. Another, by Iranian photographer Forough Alaei, documents the lives of women working as fishers in the Persian Gulf.

So leave #foodporn behind.

It is time—indeed, imperative—to enter the age of #ethicfood.