Deep themes simmer in Feast for the Eyes' food photography
The Polygon exhibition features some of the art world’s biggest names capturing one of photography’s oldest subjects
Jo Ann Callis, Untitled, 1994, from the series Forbidden Pleasures, Archival pigment print. Courtesy the artist and Rose Gallery, Santa Monica, California.
Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography runs at the Polygon Gallery from March 4 to May 30.
CINDY SHERMAN, ANDY Warhol, Man Ray, Nobuyoshi Araki, Helmut Newton, and Imogen Cunningham—they’re among more than 60 artists whose work makes up a sweeping forthcoming exhibition at the Polygon Gallery centred on one of photography’s earliest subjects: food.
Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography is a history of lens-based art from the form’s first still lifes to 1950s cookbooks to Instagram. While what we’re accustomed to seeing on social media are usually nothing more than photos of what someone had for lunch (often taken by influencers being paid to do just that), the images that make up Feast for the Eyes are not only spectacular pieces of eye candy but provoking works of art that are about so much more than food itself. Aspiration, sexuality, anxiety, race, class, servitude, consumption, politics, culture, identity, poverty, and gender are just some of the themes the exhibition reveals.
Co-curated by writer Susan Bright and Aperture Foundation’s senior editor Denise Wolff, Feast for the Eyes started with Aperture Foundation’s 2017 publication of the book of the same name. The exhibition has run at Amsterdam’s Foam and at London’s Photographer’s Gallery and the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg.
As Bright tells Stir via a Zoom call from her London home, it all came about quite by chance.
Bright, who was a curator at London’s National Portrait Gallery before deciding to work independently in the early 2000s, has a PhD in curating from Goldsmiths, University of London. With a long-standing interest in underexplored histories in art and photography, she co-curated a landmark exhibition at Tate Britain in 2007 called How We Are, the first major exhibition of British photography ever held at the renowned gallery.
Within that Tate show was a Good Housekeeping book from decades ago. “It really said a lot about personal Britain,” Bright says. “It was really sexist. The pictures were phenomenal, but nothing you'd ever want to eat. It was very aspirational—and that's something that is really important in the exhibition, this idea of striving, the guru books kind of telling you what you should be interested in or trying to achieve, and that’s especially strong now. I found it so interesting to see photographs of food not in a commercial context, but as a social history.”
Bright tucked the idea away in her mind, then one day while out and about ran into Wolff, whom she had worked with previously. Wolff specializes in large thematic photography books with Aperture and happens to be an avid cookbook collector. “It was a chance meeting on the street where I said ‘Oh, I'd really like to do something with food photography.’ And that was it: we were off. It was a match made in heaven.”
That was about a decade ago, and the two spent years amassing images and paring down their selections, which range from a stereographic slaughterhouse photo by B. L. Singley circa 1894 to Weegee’s documentation of kids with a birthday cake from around 1953 to Harold Edgerton’s famous stop-motion stroboscope photos (such as 1964’s Bullet Through Apple).
Sandy Skoglund, Peas on a Plate, 1978, Archival pigment print. © 1978 Sandy Skoglund, Courtesy RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.
What’s included in Feast for the Eyes isn’t strictly food photography but images of food in fashion, advertising, industrial, and editorial photography and beyond. It illustrates how, with the rise of food-photo sharing on social media, traditional commercial photography has become a form of fine art.
There are large-scale colour photos by British Nigerian artist Rotimi Fani-Kayode, who used herbs from Nigeria in works addressing homosexuality, spirituality, postcolonialism, and the black body. The exhibition includes pieces from Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, by photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith D’Aluisio, of what families around the world eat every week, with grocery lists and spending amounts. Images by Chris Maggio’s Male Chef appear, the photographer mocking healthy-living and food blogs.
Feast for the Eyes is divided into three sections: Still Life (which dates back to 1845 and includes black-and-white images by war photographer Roger Fenton); Around the Table, which looks at social and cultural traditions and how food brings people together; and Playing With Your Food, where Vik Muniz’s peanut butter and jelly recreation of Warhol’s Double Mona Lisa can be seen (and where a library of rare cookbooks is on hand for viewers to flip through).
The exhibition looks at how certain cookbooks have become status symbols. Think anything by Yotam Ottolenghi. “Those books are now like art books, right?” Bright says. “If you’ve got that lovely new Nordic cooking book on your shelf, it shows a certain kind of sophistication.
“The last section [Playing With Your Food] is kind of fun and funny, but also disgusting,” Bright says. “I wanted to get that idea of how food is not an easy subject for a lot of people. That’s what I liked about the subject: food is the most everyday thing, but actually the most everyday things are the most complex.”
Photographer unknown, Weight Watchers recipe cards, 1974. Courtesy Aperture Foundation, New York.
Robert Doisneau, Nan Goldin, Luis Lemus, Laura Letinsky, Russell Lee, Ouka Leele, Martha Rosler, and Romulo Yanes are among the other photographers whose works are on display in the exhibition, which travels from striking to subversive while celebrating the art form itself.
“What I’ve been surprised by is the range of photographs in that there's authentic journalism; there’s fluffy; there’s art. There’s Weight Watchers cards,” Bright says. “I’ve tried to situate these photographs within a cultural context.”
For more information about Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography, visit the Polygon Gallery.
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