Phood and Fotography

Something to Chew On
by Claudia Bodmer

Food is all the rage these days. Films from Julie and Julia to Food, Inc. light up theater marquees. The latest weather forecast is Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Television has whole channels devoted to food preparation. Chefs have become celebrities. Food today has style and fashion. However loosely defined organic may be, organic is in…if you can afford it. Perhaps you are not yet caught up in this trend. Maybe cookbooks aren’t the largest collection in your personal library. Maybe your frying pan is not endorsed by a favorite chef. Maybe your spice rack has not spilled over into neighboring cupboards. No matter. If you do not yet live to eat, you still must eat to live. And eat we do. Super-sized portions have created super-sized Americans. Discriminating super-sized Americans, it should be noted. No more standard hotdog-and-a-beer at the ballpark. How about pulled pork, a spicy tuna roll or a burrito? And, to accompany it, would a microbrewery pilsner, lager or hefeweizen bring you true hoppiness?
What can one take away from the Foodie Era besides refined tastes and weighty worries? By analogy, one might gain some nourishing insights into photography. Here are a dozen to amuse the bouche.

Ah, the flavor of a vine-ripened home-grown tomato! We can and should both connect with the earth and save the earth by eating locally grown food. Travel, like eating, can be wonderfully broadening. Might we not make a similar case for discovering the visual treasures closer to home, thereby reducing our carbon/digital footprint on the planet?

It seems the more upscale the restaurant, the less food on the plate. Instead the plate becomes a canvas with color, shape and texture all hinting at a dining experience that will carry one to the heights (and a bill that will likewise defy gravity). Should one approach photographic presentation with similar attention? How might projected images be introduced to hint at and create a sense of expectation for what is to come? How significant is matting and framing and placement? An image has seconds to grab and hold the viewer’s attention.

A gleaming, newly remodeled kitchen with top of the line appliances can be a great place to create a gourmet meal for family and friends. It can also be a lovely like-new setting to admire while enjoying a cocktail before dinner out. The Viking stove does not make the dinner. The chef does. The latest photographic equipment can be similarly used to great effect or with quite ordinary results or be just for show. The camera doesn’t make the photograph. The photographer does.

Cookbooks, recipes, how-to-shows all help us prepare food well. It is flattering to be asked for one’s recipe after a good meal. Photographs have recipes too: camera settings, lighting, special equipment, etc. Just like recipes are handed down in families, photo recipes can be handed down in camera clubs. In both settings, not everyone has the same success with the same recipe.

Atypical ingredients, limited time and four competing chefs are featured in Chopped. Each chef works with the same four ingredients to prepare a course that will outshine the others in presentation, taste and originality. With each successive course, a competitor is ‘chopped’ by the judges until the meal is completed and a winner remains. Four photographers shoot the same subject at the same time in the same light. One time it’s a landscape, the next time a person, the next a still life, the next an animal. Who will be chopped?

A hundred years ago, the odds were 50-50 you were a farmer. Mass production and distribution of food has dramatically reduced those odds and distanced the food consumer from the process of food creation. Has the automation of photography likewise made us memory card consumers, insensitive to the photographic process? What does it take to see the light?

How does one properly prepare a grasshopper, a rooster’s comb, a duck’s foot, an unlaid egg with fallopian tube attached? If one is an aspiring Iron Chef, conquering the unusual is part of the challenge. Sure it makes for good television, but does the ‘eeew factor’ also speak to the narrowness of acquired tastes? What is the photographic parallel? Is it encouraged or discouraged by what is conventionally considered pictorial?

The smell of freshly baked bread still warm from the oven can awaken one’s senses, bring back a flood of memories and hopefully give one pause to savor the moment, the texture, the fragrance, the warmth, and then the taste. In a time of ever faster shutter speeds snapping at our multi-channeled lives, can the Slow Food movement teach us about the merits of slow photography? Isn’t it OK to say, ‘I’m just looking’?

Veganism as a diet and lifestyle is not that new but it is much more visible of late. As a result, there more awareness of animal rights issues. Being a healthy vegan takes some careful meal planning and perhaps some dietary supplements. Is there a group of purists in photography that parallels vegans? What insights does their work provide? What nutritional elements might be lacking?

Speaking of nutritional value, more people are reading the labels on food packages. Still, everyone has a favorite junk food or two, delicious and addictive, just not particularly nutritious. An extreme example is the Luther burger: a bacon cheeseburger with a glazed doughnut for a bun. What is the junk food of photography—attractive, marketed, habit-forming, and ubiquitous—that can fill one up visually while doing little to nourish the heart or mind? Are cell phone cameras and the web the delivery system?

Sugar, shakar, zucchero, sucre, whatever it’s called, it calls out to the taste buds. Good for one in moderation, sugar provides energy. Too much can be sickeningly sweet or even just sickening. Is color the sugar of photography? Does saturation drive the glucose level of our visual experience? Are there some photographs that are smooth as honey and others that rot one’s eye teeth?

To feed us, our food must die. Animals are slaughtered, crops harvested, ingredients mixed and mashed and chopped and cooked. Something is lost, transformed and consumed. We laugh at the primitive fear that a taking photograph steals the soul of the subject. And yet, photography is filled with predatory verbs like aim, shoot, capture, and grab what is in our cross-hairs. The life we viewed is stolen, frozen and transformed into an object: a photograph to be consumed by our memories and our imaginations.

If we are what we eat, then our refrigerators could be windows into our souls. Besides being a great subject for a photo-essay, a way to gain insight into our friends or an opportunity for self reflection, one could also draw a parallel with what’s in our photo files. Are we what we shoot? Is one’s photo collection visual beer or broccoli, fresh or frozen?

Insights can grow organically in the intersection of two ideas: phood and fotography. May these analogies may provide food for thought and shed light on both subjects. Bon appétit!