Food in Photography

“A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer changed after seeing it. In a word, it is effective.”—Irving Penn, photographer

The early history of photography

In photography’s early history, some photographers unexpectedly turned to still life, working with form, contrast and detail.

Here is an example of a still life by Ansel Adams, regarded as the “father” of landscape photography and one of the founders of Group f/64. He is said to have been inspired by a meeting with Paul Strand, after which he decided to become a professional photographer. In this image, using food as his subject allowed Adams to demonstrate his exceptional ability to render different textures, shadows and forms in black-and-white photography.

Another founder of Group f/64, alongside Adams, was Edward Weston. He was one of the twentieth century’s most innovative and influential American photographers.

His photographs of cabbage leaves, peppers, artichokes and mushrooms are well known and invite us to see food as part of nature’s architecture. In his pictures, these vegetables become landscapes.

• Influence and style: Edward Weston had a significant influence on the modern photography movement that began in the 1930s. He is known for photographing the natural surroundings of his home on the California coast. Weston paid particular attention to cabbages, photographing various compositions of this vegetable between 1929 and 1936. He was interested in the physical textures of vegetables, seashells and other objects that frequently became his subjects at the time.

• Group f/64: Group f/64 advocated “unmanipulated”, sharply focused photography. The group was named after the smallest aperture on the large-format cameras they used, which provided maximum sharpness. Their sharply focused lenses were the direct opposite of the blurring and softening optics used by the Pictorialist movement. Pictorial photography often lacks sharp focus, is printed in colours other than black and white—from warm brown to dark blue—and may show brushstrokes or other traces of surface treatment.

• Cabbage Leaf, Edward Weston, 1931: this is the most successful of Weston’s cabbage photographs and has become an icon of Modernist photography. Without camera tricks, he transforms an ordinary leaf into a sensual, monumental form; its undulating surface seems [the ending of the phrase is missing from the original PDF]

Edward Steichen moved food photography still further from its associations with the painterly tradition.

Working on a commission for Stehli Silk Corporation to create a pattern for its American scarf series, he arranged sugar cubes in neat rows and backlit them to create cross-hatched shadows. In this example, photography is concerned with outline, form and shadow. It becomes design.

The arrival of colour advertising

With the introduction of colour advertising in the mid-1930s, styles began to change. Food photography ceased to be exclusively a fine art: now images existed to sell.

This was the era of cookery booklets, each containing three or four pages of “Technicolor” photographs.

The work of Nickolas Muray, a photographer hired by the popular US women’s magazine McCall’s, captured lavish post-war tables full of colour, abundance and cheerfulness for its homemaking and food sections. He used the colour carbro process—a combination of carbon-based pigments and silver-bromide prints to create a single colour image—to produce richly coloured photographs of arranged food for the magazine and other advertisers until the 1950s.

These magazine images succeeded because they sold a particular way of life. They were precursors of other US magazine work that gradually became more realistic and alluring, reaching perfection on the covers of Gourmet while continuing to portray not only delicious food but also the lifestyle that accompanied it.

And, of course, none of it was edible. To preserve its appearance under the harsh direct lighting needed to obtain such bright colours, food was sprayed with hairspray or even coated with furniture varnish. Soap bubbles replaced beer foam, while glue took the place of milk in cereal. We will encounter this problem of preservation and its solution in Topic 9, “Food in Films”. Only in the 1990s did commercial food photography for magazines and cookbooks shift from these theatrical presentations towards more naturalistic images of real food.

Photojournalism in the 1950s

In France during the 1950s, black-and-white photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson set a standard for photojournalism to which many journalists still aspire.

He was a master of candid street photography and coined the term “the decisive moment”. His photograph of a small boy carrying two bottles of wine is an excellent example of such a moment.

Another photographer equally skilled at capturing people in candid pictures and portraits, with some attention to street food, was the Armenian-Turkish photojournalist Ara Güler. For more than five decades, he documented a city’s memory as a visual historian known as “the Eye of Istanbul”.

Chatting in a Passage Cafe in Beyoglu, Ara Güler, 1958

Images like these captured national identity and remained recognisable around the world for generations. The “macaroni eaters” of Naples provide another example of this formation of identity, subsequently reinforced by similar images in cinema.

William Eggleston

Sometimes photographs of food without people were just as powerful in creating atmosphere and shaping national identity.

In the 1970s and 1980s, William Eggleston photographed everyday places, petrol stations and supermarkets—the banality and consumer culture surrounding him.

He was interested in structure and composition from unusual angles, making his ordinary subjects poetic by finding harmony in colour and form. There is a sense of a “stolen moment” before people enter the frame again.

Photograph captions:

• Untitled, William Eggleston, 1983–1986 (left: tomatoes beside a sink)

• Untitled, William Eggleston, 1976 (right: diner interior)

Peter Fischli and David Weiss

Sometimes artists have no particular reason for using food in their art.

In 1979, Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss created their Wurstserie, or “Sausage Series”, styling sausages and pickled cucumbers to make them appear to be choosing carpets in a shop or attending a fashion show. The series consisted of ten photographs, each depicting a small dramatic scene created mainly from an assortment of sausages, sliced meats and various domestic objects. Their work was surreal and playful. It has been compared with Dada and Fluxus art. We will consider Fluxus in our final topic, when discussing anti-art and hospitality.

The use of colour in the 1970s

In the 1970s, Irving Penn created clean, bright still lifes of food using blocks of colour.

In these works, he placed food in unusual compositions. He was a fashion photographer who made a series on “small trades”, photographing workers in their work clothes with their tools, isolating them in his studio and turning them into prototypes, or archetypes, of their trades.

This photograph has a real modernity and simplicity. The thaw is only just beginning; there is a feeling of anticipation. The colour is changing. In this image, Penn holds time still. Yet there is also the promise of new beginnings. After thawing, all of it will return to life.

Ouka Leele

In the space where the boundary between commercial and fine-art photography becomes blurred, Spanish photographer Ouka Leele uses colour playfully.

She hand-colours her black-and-white photographs. The artist became well known after the fall of Franco’s fascist regime, and her colourful images reflect that new period of freedom and exuberance, with its wider artistic possibilities. The image below, Peluquería, Limones (“Hairdresser’s, Lemons”), resembles an advertisement but is not one. Photograph caption: Ouka Leele, Peluquería, Limones, 1979

Jo Ann Callis

Photographer Jo Ann Callis emerged in the late 1970s as one of the first important figures in the fabricated-photograph movement. She worked with colour photography, sculpture, painting and digital images. She staged scenes to convey the sensual tones and textures of fabric and food.

The food, often set against bright, saturated colours, appears extraordinarily sensual. Callis’s food is feminine in a way that critiques feminine clichés. Photograph caption: Jo Ann Callis, Untitled, 1994, from the series Forbidden

Pleasures

Photorealism in the 1980s

The rise of Photorealism in the 1970s reasserted illusionistic, realistic representation while retaining some Pop Art ideas about merging object, image and commercial product; this tendency continued into the 1980s. The work of Ralph Goings and Martin Parr is characteristic in this respect:

Martin Parr

Martin Parr draws on clichés or stereotypes to depict food and comment on national identity. His images are often garish, consumerist and, quite frequently, simply absurd.

Parr focuses on what is considered “ordinary” food: not the food of banquets or weddings, but that of church bake sales and butchers’ counters. Here, the British seaside appears as a scrum of people waiting for hot dogs and tea.

Contemporary photography and Sarah Lucas

This lecture considers the transformation of contemporary photography from a documentary practice into a medium that manipulates reality and conveys social messages. Particular attention is given to staged scenes and mixed media that create images resembling performance. Artist Sarah Lucas is singled out as a key figure, especially for Two Fried Eggs and Kebab, which uses found objects and visual humour to parody traditional still life and challenge social norms, particularly those concerning representations of the female body. The lecture explains how Lucas uses male and female symbols in a non-sexualised, non-moralising way, exploring moral dilemmas and creating humorous, subversive narratives.

1. The evolution of contemporary photography

The shift from documentation to manipulation

Photography is no longer regarded solely as the art of recording what is seen. It has become a medium that manipulates reality through staged scenes, objects placed outside familiar contexts, and combinations of photography with other techniques.

Staged photography as social commentary

Artists have experimented with staged photography since the beginning of the last century. This approach allows images to be created as performances and to communicate social messages, in a manner similar to Pop Art strategies.

2. Artist analysis: Sarah Lucas Artistic style and methods. Sarah Lucas is an English artist known for visual humour. Her works use photography, collage and found objects. She parodies the traditional still-life genre and seeks to question cultural norms.

A well-known work: Two Fried Eggs and Kebab. The work depicts two fried eggs and a kebab arranged on a wooden table. The composition resembles a female body, specifically the features to which it is often reduced: breasts and a vagina. Artistic intention and interpretation. Lucas uses male symbols, such as a phallic banana, though not in this work, and female symbols, such as fried eggs as breasts. Despite this, her art is not considered sexual or didactic. She explores moral dilemmas and creates humorous narratives. The work demonstrates food’s flexibility as an artistic material: it can be both funny and subversive.

Comparison with Judy Chicago. Two Fried Eggs and Kebab invites comparison with Judy Chicago’s feminist work The Dinner Party. Sarah Lucas’s work, however, is not explicitly labelled feminist.

Sian Bonnell

Two decades after Fischli and Weiss’s “sausage photographs”, English photographer Sian Bonnell photographed slices of bologna sausage arranged as tiles in her kitchen, and a ring of fried eggs around the lavatory in her bathroom, resembling a mat.

She placed household objects and food in unfamiliar contexts within various theatrical installations, often in her own home, and photographed them. In these works, the photographer becomes a performance artist. She no longer photographs food as an everyday object but reinterprets it to examine typical English food and domestic space critically, as we saw, for example, in Claes Oldenburg’s hamburger.

Between 2003 and 2005, Sian Bonnell created a project called Everyday Dada, making various installations throughout her home using food as a material. The project included subcategories such as “Serving Suggestions”, “Dream Home”, “Forensic Housekeeping” and “Picturesque Cooking”. In the series, Bonnell works against familiar conventions of decoration and food presentation by combining them. In several photographs, for example, she uses sliced processed meat as kitchen and bathroom tiles.

Pomegranate blood: still life at 1,600 frames per second

Work under consideration: Pomegranate (2006).

If Sian Bonnell transformed food into strange domestic décor, Israeli artist Ori Gersht does something quite opposite: he deconstructs the very essence of stillness. He takes the classical “matrix” of a seventeenth-century still life and introduces a modern instrument of destruction.

An explosion as an act of communication In his series, Gersht explores the relationship between photography and digital technology at the moment when the camera stops merely recording reality and begins to “see” the invisible. By filming at 1,600 frames per second, he literally stops time at the moment a pomegranate explodes. What is only an instantaneous bang to our eyes becomes a majestic and terrifying process of transformation through the lens.

The contrast: tranquillity versus bloodshed In the manuscript, the work is compared with Juan Sánchez Cotán’s Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber (1602).

Gersht’s work enters into a direct dialogue with Juan Sánchez Cotán’s 1602 painting.

• In Cotán: we see absolute balance, silence and the mathematically precise arrangement of suspended fruit. It is the apotheosis of aesthetics and humility.

• In Gersht: the serene image turns into “bloodshed”. A bullet pierces the fruit, and the pomegranate—which in Hebrew sounds the same as “grenade”—lives up to its name.

This is a powerful example of food ceasing to be an everyday object and becoming an indicator of social tension. Here, the aesthetics of still life collide with the physical violence of technology, creating a new form of catharsis through the shock of the beauty of destruction. Cotán’s stillness serves merely as a background, bringing out more vividly the energy of an explosion that cannot be seen with the naked eye but can now be felt subconsciously.

Laura Letinsky: the aesthetics of scraps and the melancholy of the table

Instead of photographing classical still lifes of appetising food awaiting a meal, Letinsky photographs what remains on the table afterwards. A philosophy of decay

• Field of investigation: the artist explores the fine boundary between ripeness and rot, abundance and waste, pleasure and the mere maintenance of life.

• The absence of people: there are no people in the images, only their “traces”—the remains of a lavish dinner, rubbish and scraps.

• Melancholy still life: instead of anticipating a celebration, we see its ending. It is a quiet, almost intimate view of pleasure’s finitude. Where are the “digital intervention” and deconstruction here?

If we compare her with Ori Gersht, we see two opposite approaches to time:

1. Ori Gersht (explosion): he uses extremely high-speed filming—1,600 frames per second—to freeze time at the moment of catastrophe, the explosion of a pomegranate. He turns a peaceful seventeenth-century still life into a “bloodbath”, in which a bullet invisible to the eye becomes the principal actor. His work is a dialogue with Juan Sánchez Cotán, where classical stillness collides with technological violence.

2. Laura Letinsky (decay): by contrast, she slows the gaze. Her work is “slow” art. She takes the same classical still-life matrix but strips it of its ceremonial splendour. Her “rubbish” looks as aesthetically pleasing as Cotán’s melon, making us seek beauty in what we usually discard. To sum up: Bonnell turned food into absurd décor, Gersht into a war zone, and Letinsky into a monument to a vanished moment.

What does this offer us as investigators?

• Bonnell teaches us to see structure and form in food, separating taste from visual context.

• Gersht exposes the hidden aggression and dynamics we do not register in everyday life without technological help.

• Letinsky makes us experience catharsis through absence, as we judge a person and their empathy only from the rubbish they have left behind.

In each case, food ceases to be “merely an ingredient” and becomes a complete language of communication, conveying meanings from social protest to existential sadness.

Gastronomic catharsis: from sausage tiles to an exploding pomegranate

Food is more than calories or flavour: it is a complete language of communication that contemporary artists dissect with surgical precision. To truly “read” contemporary art through a plate, we need to step beyond the dining table.

1. Domestic absurdity: food as a building material The first step towards understanding is to deprive an ingredient of its sacred function of “being eaten”. In Everyday Dada, Sian Bonnell transforms slices of bologna sausage into kitchen tiles and fried eggs into a lavatory mat.

• This makes us rethink domestic space and typical English food critically.

• The photographer acts as a performer, tearing everyday objects out of their familiar context.

2. Technological violence: the moment of disintegration Where Bonnell works with static absurdity, Ori Gersht reveals the dynamics of destruction. Using extremely high-speed filming at 1,600 frames per second, he records the instant a bullet turns a ripe pomegranate into a bloody mess.

• In this act, the classical aesthetics of seventeenth-century still life—an homage to Juan Sánchez Cotán—collide with contemporary violence.

• A linguistic trap lies here: the Hebrew words for “pomegranate” and “grenade” are identical, turning the fruit into a symbol of concealed threat and social explosion.

3. The melancholy of leftovers: life after triumph We see the culmination of this transformation in Laura Letinsky. She rejects glossy images of “food awaiting its consumer” and focuses on scraps.

• Her work explores the delicate relationship between abundance and rubbish, pleasure and decay.

• The absence of people makes their “traces”—dirty dishes and the remains of dinner—even more eloquent indicators of human presence. Conclusion: we see a path from shock (Bonnell), through an emotional explosion (Gersht), to quiet empathy and awareness that a moment is finite (Letinsky). This is a true neurogastronomy of the spirit, in which the visual image of food opens a direct path to the subconscious, making us experience catharsis where we once saw only breakfast.

Elad Lassry: a glitch in the commercial matrix Elad Lassry is a contemporary artist who uses commercial food-photography techniques for artistic purposes. His compositions emphasise the deliberate staging and construction of photographic images, questioning the reality of photography itself.

“I am fascinated by the collapse of stories and the confusion that arises when there is something ‘slightly wrong’ in a photograph,” he says.

Although his work does not focus exclusively on food, it includes notable examples such as Chocolate Bars, Eggs and Milk.

Nanda: globalisation versus tradition Korean artist Nanda creates works that refer to Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s soup series. She overlays elements of Korean tradition onto the global culture of coffee and tea consumption.

• A collision of worlds: she places takeaway cups from the Coffee Bean chain within a traditional tea-ceremony setting.

• A critique of standardisation: through interaction with mass-produced goods, the artist critiques contemporary society.

• The duplication effect: by repeating the image of the same woman, Nanda draws our attention to how standardised our gastronomic experience has become in the age of globalisation.

Carl Warner: architect of edible worlds British artist Carl Warner concludes the food-photography topic; his work forms a distinct category of commercial art.

• Foodscapes: Warner became famous for detailed landscapes built entirely from food and ingredients.

• A fresh perspective: his aim is to inspire people to look at food from another angle.

• Advertising craftsmanship: much of his work was created for advertising, demonstrating the possibilities of food photography when food is both object and subject of the image.

The gastronomic architecture of consciousness Where Nanda exposes standardisation through paper cups, Carl Warner takes this idea to its limit by turning ingredients themselves into mountains, forests and seas. We see a complete cycle: from food that cannot be eaten (Bonnell) to food that becomes an entire universe (Warner).

This exploration demonstrates that, through a master’s lens, food ceases to be merely fuel for the body. It becomes a mirror reflecting our fears (Gersht), our past (Letinsky), our false present (Lassry) and our global ambitions (Nanda).

Food-photography techniques. This lecture introduces food photography as a rapidly developing genre at the intersection of art and gastronomy. It emphasises the shared technical foundations of commercial and fine-art photography and their common aim: to use a two-dimensional frame to evoke strong emotions. By analysing the techniques of leading practitioners, particularly their use of angles, composition and colour, photographers can improve projects for marketing, websites, social media or personal purposes.

1. The nature and purpose of food photography

A popular genre. Food photography is becoming increasingly popular in both the art world and gastronomy.

Elements shared with fine-art photography. Commercial food photography shares key technical elements with fine-art photography. Both use two-dimensional space to create still images that elicit an emotional response in viewers.

The principal aim. The main aim of food photography, as of any art, is to evoke strong emotions in the viewer.

A broad range of applications. Food photography is widely used in marketing, for personal pleasure, on websites and on social media.

2. Improving food-photography skills. Key technical elements.

The impression made by a food photograph depends to a large extent on angle, composition and colour.

Learning from the masters. Develop your skills by studying the genre’s history and the work of master food photographers. Analysing their work helps you set higher creative ambitions.

A brief history of food photography by period The beginning: still life → advertising (up to the 1950s)

Food photography grew out of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century painted still lifes. When magazine advertising emerged, food began to be photographed for print. Features of the early period:

• studio lighting

• staged scenes

• food looked “perfect” but not always realistic; varnish, glue, foam instead of milk, and so on were used The main task: to make the product as attractive as possible for advertising.

The magazine era (1950–1980). The growth of food magazines and cookbooks brought the genre to a mass audience.

Key changes:

• the arrival of colour printing

• the development of a visual language for recipes

• standards for cookbooks Food still looked “perfect”, but the idea of atmosphere had begun to emerge.

The “real food” revolution (1980–2000)

This period brought a turning point: food began to look alive and natural rather than plastic. The main changes:

• natural light instead of harsh studio lighting arrangements

• imperfections became part of the aesthetic

• food styling emerged as a profession

Social media and the digital era (2000 → today). Food photography became:

• part of restaurant marketing

• a key tool for brands

• a widespread skill (Instagram, TikTok) Today, the genre is divided into:

• commercial advertising

• editorial photography

• fine-art food photography

• social-media content The principal aim remains the same: to evoke emotion and appetite.

Masters of food photography (studying their styles) 1. Irving Penn

One of the first to turn food into an art object. What to study:

• minimalism

• graphic qualities

• a clean background

• attention to form What we learn: 👉 Food can be art as well as advertising.

2. Jonathan Lovekin. A photographer who changed the visual language of cookbooks. Style:

• natural light

• gentle disorder

• “life in the kitchen”

He photographed Jamie Oliver’s books.

What we learn: 👉 Food should look real and alive.

3. David Loftus. One of the best-known contemporary food photographers. Style:

• bright colours

• movement

• storytelling What we learn: 👉 A photograph should tell the story of a dish.

4. Bea Lubas. A contemporary Instagram and magazine aesthetic. Style:

• soft light

• pastel shades

• minimalism

• airiness What we learn: 👉 Colour and light create a brand’s mood.

5. Skyler Burt. Commercial food photography of a high standard.

Style:

• dramatic light

• textures

• a cinematic quality What we learn: 👉 Light = the principal instrument of emotion.

Main conclusions (what to remember)

1⃣ The aim of a food photograph

Not to show food.

👉 To make the viewer feel.

2⃣ Three foundations of a strong image

Angle: from above—graphic qualities and composition

• 45°—restaurant style

• at dish level—a “sense of being there”

Composition: the rule of thirds

• negative space

• rhythm and balance Colour: warm colours → appetite

• cool colours → freshness

• contrast → focus of attention

3⃣ The masters’ central principle. Food photography = a mixture of:

• art

• marketing

• psychology

• light

Examining food photographs: how to analyse an image

Use this framework when examining any photograph of food.

Image-analysis method (four steps)

1. Light

2. Angle

3. Composition

4. Emotion and story The main question is always: why do I want to eat this right now?

Examples of analysing the masters’ work

1. Natural light and a “living kitchen”

Photographs by Andrew Scrivani. What we see:

• soft light from a window to the side

• many textures: wood, fabric, ceramics

• traces of cooking: crumbs, drops of sauce Why it works:

• the brain reads “reality”

• a sense of presence is created

• the food appears freshly prepared 👉 Perfect cleanliness kills appetite. What students should remember:

2. Minimalism and colour

Donna Hay’s work. Features:

• a light background

• one to three colours in the frame

• simple geometry Why it works:

• the eye rests

• attention remains entirely on the dish

• an ideal style for social media What to remember: 👉 The less clutter, the more expensive the image looks.

3. Storytelling and imagination

Carl Warner’s work (the Food Landscapes series). Features:

• food becomes landscapes

• a subject and story within the frame

• a strong “wow” effect Why it works:

• emotion + surprise

• the image is memorable What to remember: 👉 Food photography can be conceptual art.