Peluquería, Limones, 1979, C-print.
Courtesy of the artist.
What more is there possibly to say about food? It’s been covered in every imaginable medium painting, writing, film, photography almost to the point of total exhaustion. Anyone with a smartphone can document their meals and share them with the world.
But just when you think there couldn’t be anything left, along comes something like
Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography that reinvents the wheel all over again. Actually, that wheel is an oozing hunk of melting brie and an overripe red pear, photographed by American photographer Irving Penn. Garnished with a single black ant, the image traipses along the borderline between luscious and obscene.
Both titles offer comprehensive and refreshing additions to the tradition of street photography. In
Perfect Strangers, O’Shaughnessy enters the territory with clarity and a distinctly humanist eye. Through her curious and quirky vision, we witness the play of human activity on the glittering sidewalks of New York. Meanwhile, Samoilova’s new book showcases one hundred contemporary women street photographers working around the world today, their photographs accompanied by personal statements about their work. In turns intimate and candid, the photographs featured in
Women Street Photographers offer a kaleidoscopic glimpse into what happens when women across the world are the ones behind the camera.
Food is the subject of Feast for the Eyes, an exhibit that features work by more than 60 photographers and artists stretching back more than 100 years. We talked to co-curator Denise Wolff, who is with the New York-based Aperture Foundation, about whether visitors to the upcoming Canadian premiere of the show will feel hungry, who has the best cookbooks and whether this historical perspective on food photography justifies sharing photos of your lunch on social media.
Q: Where did the idea for the exhibit come from?
A: I had been interested in photographs of food for a long time. I had been thinking about a book but I didn’t have an author for it. One day I ran into (photography curator and writer) Susan Bright. I found out she was very interested in food as well. We thought, “We have to do this as a book.” Then we decided that it would be a great exhibition.