Two types of art exhibition
There are, maybe, two types of exhibition – the ‘open’ and the ‘closed’. An example of a ‘closed’ exhibition is the massive William Blake show currently on at Tate Britain, which presents Blake’s work in chronological order, explaining his etchings and paintings and illustrations in a cumulative way, so that you really have to pay attention and read all the wall labels to understand what’s going on, and to be able to move forward.
In an ‘open’ exhibition, by contrast, there’s just a lot of stuff hung up on the walls and you can wander round and look at whatever takes your fancy, popping in and out, window shopping, snacking, returning to the same rooms later to have another go round. Maybe the curators have organised it a bit by themes, but it doesn’t matter too much whether you pay any attention to them – you are, in effect, free to stroll around and create your own route and draw your own conclusions.
Feast For The Eyes is very much an ‘open’ exhibition. It brings together over 140 works, from black-and-white silver gelatin prints and early experiments with colour processes, to contemporary works of all shapes and sizes and styles, all focusing on the yummylicious subject of food.
Phillip J. Stazzone is on WPA and enjoys his favourite food as he’s heard that the Army doesn’t go in very strong for serving spaghetti (1940) by Weegee © Weegee/International Center of Photography
The sociology of food
Feeding is a basic activity of all life forms. All of us have to take in nutrition – foodstuffs which can provide protein, calories, fats, essential acids, vitamins and so on.
And for as long as we have had records, food has held a richly varied symbolic and allegorical meaning for peoples and societies – from Eve eating the apple in Paradise through to Mom serving up all-American apple pie in a 1950s kitchen.
New Recipes for Good Eating, Crisco, Proctor and Gamble, Cincinnati. Photographer unknown
The growing, harvesting, preparation, cooking and consumption of food has been accompanied throughout human history and around the globe by all kinds of rituals and celebrations – as are new births, the annual celebration of birthdays, the activities surrounding mourning – all have come with their own traditions of foods and drinks.
Photography and food
So, what about photography and food? Well, as soon as photography was invented, the earliest pioneers – alongside portraits and pictures of landscapes and houses – experimented with taking photos of food. For the most part they arranged and posed foodstuffs in the layouts which had been developed by the painters of still lives.
Still Life with Fruit and Decanter by Roger Fenton c.1860
The exhibition includes some very early three-dimensional or stereographic images produced by the London Stereoscopic Company in the 1850s, two colour images side by side designed to be viewed through a special stereoscopic viewer to create an early 3-D experience.
In the 160 years since Fenton’s pioneering work, people have taken countless millions more photos of food of every possible types and shape, from every possible national cuisine, in every possible position and angle, taken in styles which range from early Victorian, through social realism and documentary styles (the poor in Victorian slums or 1930s Depression-era America).
The Faro Caudill Family Eating Dinner in Their Dugout, Pie Town, New Mexico, 1940. by Russell Lee. Courtesy The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
The exhibition includes experimental Modernism of Man Ray and the like, through to 1960s pop art which, Andy Warhol-style, presented po-faced photos of mass produced tins and cans as themselves worthy of interest and respect, like this great blank photo of a tin of spam by Ed Ruscha.
Spam (1961) by Ed Ruscha © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery
Thus Feast for the Eyes sets out to give examples of pretty much every way food has been prepared, posed and consumed over the past 150 or so years – from a poptastic 1960s art film by Carolee Schneemann of an art happening where a bunch of scantily clad young men and women holding dead chickens rolled and cavorted over each other – to a feast arranged to take place on a long table straddling the USA-Mexico border.
There are collages and cutups, sexy images of rude food, sculpted food, architectural food, and so on. There’s everything from tiny old Victorian photos to huge new prints enabled by the latest digital technology by the likes of Cindy Sherman and Wolfgang Tillmans.
Untitled from the series Forbidden Pleasures by Jo Ann Callis (1994)
There is, of course, also a whole world of cookbooks to be explored – dating back as far as the famous Mrs Beeton, and illustrated from the late Victorian period onwards with all manner of photos.
A good chunk of the show features those very distinctive illustrations you used to see in 1950s and 1960s cookbooks, the kind I remember my mum having, where colour printing was going through a very distinctive phase which made everything look like it was under neon lighting, where every food known to man or woman seemed to be coloured either vivid pink or orange or yellow.
Some of the corny old 1950s and 60s cookbooks on show at Feast for the Eyes. Photo by the author
And all that’s before you even approach the huge volume of images created to fill the wide universe of advertising every conceivable foodstuff as well as cookery implement.
Classic black and white photography
Insofar as it has been a subject of photography right from the beginning, food offers a way of surfing through the history of photography seen via one topic. Thus the exhibition includes some extremely famous food-related photos – Robert Doisneau’s one of Picasso sitting at a table which cleverly replaces his fingers with baby baguettes, or the super-famous image by Henri Cartier-Bresson of two couples having a picnic by the river, the man in the foreground pouring himself a glass of red wine.
Picnic on the Banks of the Marne (1938) by Henri Cartier-Bresson
So there are works by Weegee, Irving Penn, Man Ray and Edward Steichen, classics of black and white photography.
Modern and weird
But there are also plenty of works by new and contemporary photographers, such as Imogen Cunningham, Roe Ethridge, Lorenzo Vitturi – creator of surreal images paying homage to Ridley Road Market in London’s East End – and Joseph Maida – the latter represented by a quartet of fancy food images from his series Things R Queer in which he mixes up food porn and Pop art humour, advertising glossiness and Japanese cuteness.
#jelly #jello #fruity #fruto #thingsarequeer (October 26, 2014) by Joseph Maida. Courte
Political photography
And food can be political in the most basic sense that some people have a lot while others have little or none – one of the basic causes of conflict around the world and throughout history. A striking political image in the show is by the French photographer JR, who took an aerial view of migrants having a picnic on a long bench set up across the US-Mexico border, the table covered with a table cloth printed with the eyes of a child migrant.
Migrants, Mayra, Picnic across the border, Tecate, Mexico-USA (2017) by JR
The curators’ three themes
The curators have themselves arranged the works under three headings – Still Life, Around the Table and Playing with Food, and their wall labels and explanations group works together into three rooms (which are colour coded, the walls painted a vivid yellow, red and blue respectively). They expand on the themes and discuss issues around the tradition of still lives, or the sociology of eating. They provide plenty of food for thought.
But we are free to ignore them if we prefer, and wander at will, letting ourselves be struck by vivid and arresting images as we come across them, such as this classic depiction of the reality of unvarnished life in modern England by the poet laureate of the mundane and everyday, Martin Parr.
New Brighton, England, 1983–85 by Martin Parr © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos
One of my favourite images was a 1977 still life by the American photographer Irving Penn. Penn had the bright idea of taking blocks of frozen food from his freezer – or more probably of creating blocks of frozen food in a freezer – then taking them out and arranging them as sculptures and photographing them. His photos capture the moment as the blocks of fruit and veg start to melt and the white frosting starts to give way to the true underlying colour of the various foodstuffs. Vivid, creative.
Frozen Food (With String Beans), New York, 1977 by Irving Penn
Photographers
The show includes works by:
- Nobuyoshi Araki
- Guy Bourdin
- Imogen Cunningham
- Roe Ethridge
- Marion Faller and Hollis Frampton
- Rotimi Fani Kayode
- Roger Fenton
- Peter Fischli and David Weiss
- Nan Goldin
- Daniel Gordon
- Rinko Kawauchi
- Russell Lee
- Laura Letinsky
- Vik Muniz
- Nickolas Muray
- Martin Parr
- Irving Penn
- Man Ray
- Martha Rosler
- Ed Ruscha
- Cindy Sherman
- Stephen Shore
- Edward Steichen
- Wolfgang Tillmans
- Lorenzo Vitturi
- Tim Walker
- Andy Warhol
- Weegee
- Edward Weston
- Hank Willis Thomas
and many others. It is a smörgåsbord of imagery, a tasty buffet of photos old and new, large and small, black and white or coloured, digital and analogue, posed or au naturel, a rich array which creates all kinds of memories, associations and sensations in the visitor (by the end I found I was feeling really peckish – one of the 1960s style photos of swirly vanilla and strawberry ice cream had really pushed my button).
It only costs £5 to visit the Photographers’ Gallery, and this is only one of three exhibitions currently on there. Pop along and feast your mince pies.
Curators
Feast for the Eyes – The Story of Food in Photography is organised by the Aperture Foundation, New York and curated by Susan Bright and Denise Wolff.
Related links
- Feast For The Eyes: The Story Of Food In Photography continues at the Photographers’ Gallery until 9 February 2020
Books & Boots 