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Elizabeth David famously despised photographs of food. And well she might. For most of the time she was writing, food photography was awful. This wasn’t due to aesthetic inadequacy, but the purely technical problems of the medium. If you wanted a colour picture for a book, magazine, or advertisement hoarding in 1960, it would need to be shot in a studio, on a large-format 5×4 or 10×8 camera. Colour transparency stock was “slow”. It took an enormous amount of light to make a decent picture, so the camera was bolted down, the shutter stayed open for long exposures while hot tungsten lights beat down on the food. It was really no wonder that the pictures looked artificial. It was all cold, all propped into place, and half of it was probably sprayed with oil or varnish to make it look the tiniest bit appetising.
David knew that there is only one criterion for a picture of food to succeed: deliciousness. You couldn’t convey deliciousness with the photography of her era, which is why she painted such delicious pictures with words. She rejected visual representation and fought publishers for the right to do so.
Fashion photography of the same period faced similar technical limitations. It’s why those 1950s Vogue shots look so characteristically poised, elegant — and still. But in the ’60s, advances in smaller, more portable cameras, faster film, and a new attitude among editors transformed the way fashion was shot. It wasn’t about how the clothes looked anymore. A photograph had to express how it might feel to wear the clothes. The images didn’t even have to be objectively beautiful if, instead, they could communicate quirkiness, fun, youth, or rebellion.
The British food renaissance of the late ’90s saw food photography follow fashion. Led by the color supplements, food photography became more “lifestyle”. Pages filled with dishes shot in natural locations, usually with shallow depth of field, so some impossibly aspirational situation might be inferred from a tantalizing blur of background. This wasn’t sausage and lentils; this was saucisse de Toulouse with puy lentils and redcurrant jelly on a heavingly packed evening in an achingly hip gastropub. It was light years away from the funereal banquets in those awful staged photos of the ’50s. Jamie or Nigella’s food would never be shot like Robert Carrier’s or Fanny Cradock’s. And the loveliest thing was that the informality, the ease, and the creativity finally achieved what David never lived to see: properly delicious pictures of food.
Then iPhones arrived, and everybody was a food photographer. With terrifying speed, the smartphone has caught up with photography, particularly of food. A shot of a meal, snapped in a restaurant by an enthusiastic diner, is a truer communication of deliciousness than even the most beautiful studio shot. The phone’s got it nailed. It’s doing everything food photography had finally developed to do, capturing well-focused, naturally lit images of something made to look delicious and served in a curated environment. What can a professional photographer and crew bring to that, except artifice?
We’ve recently witnessed some pushback. Food books and magazines have started featuring more stylized shots. Acid colors, forensic flash, and ironic formicas and plastics as props. They’re cleverly “quoting” the bad old days of food photography with hints of deliberate visual awkwardness. It’s a bit Op-art, a touch Warhol, even vaguely punk. But the trend is already dying. The pictures just don’t seem to work because nobody’s interested in looking at food if it doesn’t look delicious.
I’m lucky. I get to work with the very best food photographers and, indeed, I trained as a photographer myself. It hurts me to say this, but it feels like we’re in danger of entering a rut as the consequence of a peak. Modern food photography has achieved peak deliciousness. But the way things are moving technologically, it is a matter not of years but months before advances in smartphone lenses and algorithms mean their pictures are widely accepted for publication or printing. Then AI, fueled by those images, will create an infinite number more, with no need for human intervention.
So where is food photography going? Is it possible to predict? In the earliest days of photography, people like Julia Margaret Cameron or American photo secessionists like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen tried to make photographs in the style of traditional paintings. Photographers snapped at the heels of the fine arts. At the same time painting, which for its entire history had largely striven for the goal of emotionally affecting, lifelike representation, flew into a flat spin. What was art, if some technological process could achieve perfect realism? Photography was the insurgent medium and the painters responded by dumping realism, pursuing impressionism, abstraction, surrealism, pop, and conceptual art.
This is an alluring historic precedent but, as far as I can see, we don’t have that sort of opt-out. Elizabeth David is still correct that the only meaningful criterion in a depiction of food is deliciousness. We can’t throw that out.
I desperately don’t want the visual side of our industry to run out of road and stagnate but if food photography is constrained by deliciousness, it can’t ever have its own impressionism, dada, pop art, or anything like it. I love the work we’re doing at the moment, how could I not? It’s the best it’s ever been. But we’ve peaked, and I’m struggling to imagine how we move forward.
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