The truth about food photography

While looking at the photographs of food in this humorous exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, I thought of how hopelessly outdated our own snaps will soon look. What seems fresh, clean and wonderfully modern to our eye — an Ottolenghi salad, say, dotted with pomegranate seeds and za’atar — will soon look almost tragic. How we photograph food betrays some of our deepest fantasies about ourselves. What’s more, good taste can quickly sour.

Feast for the Eyes brings together food photography from the 19th century up to the present day and reveals just how much our attitudes to food change. At first, photographers emulated the principles of still- life painting, using symbolic gatherings and classical references. When colour photography became available, the focus moved towards capturing texture and shape. The early colour images have a softness to them that disappears as food photography becomes a more commercial pursuit. Paul Outerbridge’s ‘Avocado Pears’ (1936) is a study of the fruit’s flesh and its subtle bruising. Russell Lee’s photographs from Pie Town in New Mexico explore the harshness of daily life following the Depression.

I was delighted to see so many pictures from recipe books included in the show, as well as a number of books from different countries. The interwar and postwar periods coincided with advances in colour printing and photography techniques, as well as the rise of magical ‘convenience foods’. The results are both dazzling and disgusting. Mayonnaise drifts across the surfaces of the dishes. Diced vegetables are frozen in time — and aspic. Everything seems to be a lurid jewel colour, as if it has all been soaked in cochineal. It must have seemed unbelievably sophisticated to the 1950s housewife.

Nickolas Murray pioneered the heavily styled, elaborate tableaux that came to be a staple of both advertising and magazine editorials during the mid-century.