Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography at The Photographers’ Gallery, London

Sara Jaspan

Feeling peckish? Sara Jaspan reviews ‘Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, London. The exhibition runs until 9 February 2020.

I feel like I am mirroring my dinner date’s table manners as he shovels clods of spaghetti with wild abandon while I hungrily devour a plastic-encased, individual-portioned Sainsbury’s meal deal. He doesn’t offer much conversation; entirely focused on enjoying his favourite meal (though never quite as good as how his Italian mamma makes it) before going off to join the army.

We’re both eating alone: Stazzone in the New York diner where Weegee photographed him in 1940, I somewhere between London and Manchester on a crowded train home in 2020. His animated face is emblazoned across the front of my copy of the free guide accompanying ‘Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, sat on the table before me. Though analogue in nature, the situation is in some sense akin to the increasingly common practice of dining (or grazing) alone whilst scrolling Instagram, where carefully constructed photos of appetising food (#foodporn) are endlessly served-up and visually consumed – creating ‘sensory dissociation’, as described by academic Barbra Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. This strange development in our relationship with food marked just one of the many themes explored in the exhibition.

‘Feast for the Eyes’ draws together over 140 photographic works from the last two centuries by artists ranging from Edward Weston, Man Ray and Irving Penn to Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Martha Rosla, Wolfgang Tillmans and Martin Parr. It also contains examples of vernacular photography – large families crowded round the table for supper, newly-wed couples cutting the cake, birthday candles being blown out, idyllic summer picnics – as well as photojournalism, commercial images, and food magazines.

Out of this abundance, the visual representation of food and the ultimately primordial, inseparably cultural act of eating emerges as a richly flavoured subject. One that spans into politics, wealth, morality, the environment, health, race, gender, technology, desire, revulsion, religion, community, social status, and beyond. Essentially, food can reveal a great deal about the values, beliefs and circumstances of the time and place in which it is consumed. As the 18th century epicure and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously aphorised, ‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are’ (somehow, the phrase always brings the Italian Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s fruit and vegetable portraits to my mind).  

The show opens with its oldest work: an albumen print titled Decanter and Fruit (ca.1853-60) by Roger Fenton, which marks the start of ‘Still Life’ – one of three sections into which ‘Feast for the Eyes’ is split. Here, through the genre’s carry-over from painting into photography, visitors are reminded of how food has been used for its symbolic potential throughout the histories of art (variously to represent wealth, mortality, fertility, sex, virginity and so on), before being presented with the many ways in which photographers have drawn upon and played with the tradition since.

But it’s the content of each image that seems most interesting. For instance, Irving Penn’s precariously balanced blocks of frozen vegetables, captured in 1977, reflects the way food has become increasingly industrialised, standardised and centred around convenience. A beautifully shot photograph of two avocados taken in 1936 by Paul Outerbridge, Jr. reads in humorous contrast to the innumerable #cleaneating #smashedavo images uploaded to social media today (where the bruised areas of flesh would never be allowed) and the environmental impact of feeding this relatively recent western cultural obsession. Harold ‘Doc’ Edgerton’s famous Bullet Through Banana (1964) sits somewhere between science and art and captures the mood of progress and speed in Atomic Age America. Holger Niehaus’ Untitled (2000) stops me simply with its pure delicacy. The artist has trained his lens on the enduring still life motif of an assortment of fruit but with the gentle intervention of removing the peels first. Presented on a hard slab of cool white marble, the kiwis, bananas, grapefruit look naked and exposed; you feel a sense of empathy towards them.

The next and largest section of the show, ‘Around the Table’, shifts the focus explicitly onto the social, communal and psychological dimensions of eating. The unifying function of sharing food emerges as a key theme, succinctly articulated by French artist JR’s photograph of an epic picnic held on either side of the Mexican and American border in 2017. Conversely, the refusal to ‘break bread’ forms the subject of a small black-and-white image by an unknown photographer taken in North Carolina in 1960. Two African American students study at a lunch counter; they have no food or drink beside them as the two white waitresses refuse to serve them. Their presence in the racially segregated restaurant is an act of peaceful protest during the time of the civil rights movement.

Elsewhere, the effect of communities ‘pulling together’ in times of food scarcity is captured in two photographs by Russell Lee taken in Pie Town, New Mexico, 1940, during the end of the Depression. One shows a family eating dinner in ‘their dugout’, the other: women serving and queuing for pinto beans. Though perhaps the closest ‘Feast for the Eyes’ comes to directly addressing issues of world hunger and food-inequality (currently, an estimated 815 million people around the world do not have enough to eat), Lee’s photographs are deliberately positioned not far from Nickolas Muray’s exuberantly stylised photographs for McCall’s magazine, which reflect a contrasting time of abundance in America, freed from the food restrictions and hardships of the New Deal. Here, food becomes not a source of sustenance but of style, class and aesthetics. The artful arrangement of sliced fruit served on cold lettuce leaves alongside a portion of something unidentifiable (possibly containing bacon?), appears laughably unappetising in our current ‘foodie’ age.

Similarly, a set of Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974 provides ample amusement, with dishes including ‘Slender Quenchers’, ‘Spinach and Egg Mold’, ‘Frozen Cheese Salad’, ‘Chilled Celery Log’ and ‘Patriotic Soups’. Though humorous, these cards more importantly signify part of the marked shift in the west towards a culture of dieting and intense pressure on women (in particular) to control their body image through what they eat. Today, hospital admissions for eating disorders are at a peak across the western world, with around 1.25 million cases in the UK alone. The issue briefly resurfaces in the third section of the exhibition, ‘Playing with Food’, where Cindy Sherman’s tortured face can be seen reflected in a pair of sunglasses surrounded by the half-eaten food remains of a day by the beach and what reads possibly like a pool of vomit. Part of her ‘Disaster’ series (1986-89), the piece deliberately counters the ‘beach babe’ or ‘neat housewife’ female stereotypes and points to the internal complexities, sense of shame and self-disgust that can come to haunt people’s relationship with food.

In this way, despite its overly-performative aspect Sherman’s work seems almost violent amidst the lighter feel of the last section. We end with a photograph of Picasso with giant potatoes for hands taken by Man Ray, images of food worn as absurd fashion, a bathroom tiled in ham slices (part of Sian Bonnell’s surreal parody of the obsessive housewife). Many of the works also comment upon the relationship between food and sex. Guy Bourdin’s provocative image of two female models feeding each other erect frankfurters for Vogue Paris in 1981 is, well, comically frank. Hank Willis Thomas’ work, belonging to a series of adverts stripped of their text or logos, comments on how the bodies of Black men and white women have each been commodified by the advertising industry to sell products, including food. On the way back down the stairs to leave the gallery, visitors are confronted with a much-larger-than-life image of a man’s torso with a strategically positioned floating burger taken by Grant Cornett for Gather Journal.

It may be a banal comment, but I was surprised not to come away from ‘Feast for the Eyes’ feeling especially hungry. The exhibition takes the subject much further and is dizzying in the range of directions it explores (barely captured here). Emerging back onto the streets of London, images of food were suddenly everywhere. The KFC billboard showing a fantasy, Photoshop-ed version of glistening deep-fried chicken wings. The Magnum campaign featuring a woman experiencing a moment of intense, strictly ice-cream related pleasure. An advert for tinned peaches in which a mother serves her daughter an apparently wholesome breakfast, echoing (in no way satirically) the cover illustration of New Recipes for Good Eating (1949) – one of the many vintage cookbooks included in the show – where the perfect American housewife is shown ‘in her place’: at the stove feeding her family. Travelling home in the company of Weegee’s Stazzone, I find his image strangely comfortingly. He’s a guy who likes pasta, and that’s about all there is to it.

‘Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography’ will be on display at The Photographers’ Gallery, London until 9 February 2020.