7/12/2007

Why I Photograph Food: or, A Paean To Pork Belly


Readers of probably awkward might have noticed that we revel in food consumption. It doesn’t have to be Burger Night for MD and me to talk/IM/email about places we want to try out, places we need to go back to, or even just random links to bigger/better/weirder ways to consume pork products. I can’t speak for MD, but I’ll confess that I think about food constantly. Around 9am I think about where I might have lunch (if it’s a weekday, most likely somewhere terrible and chain-like; I work next to Port Authority); by 3pm on any given day I know what I’m doing for dinner. And it’s generally not about hunger. It’s about the pure pleasure of thinking about what sorts of food I’m going to put down my gullet. Accompanying this perhaps off-kilter obsession with food is an OCD-like need to photograph nearly everything I’m about to consume. To be sure, I don’t take pictures of my morning bagel, or my noontime sorry excuse for a salad, or anything I prepare in my tiny Manhattan kitchen (since it’s usually a bachelorette’s dinner of soy-protein-products, to balance out the ridiculous levels of meat and cholesterol I ingest when I’m dining out). But put a plate of hot food in front of me, and there’s a good chance I’ll whip out the Lumix and snap away. I’ve embarrassed dozens of friends and family members this way; since I never use flash, I figure that I’m not really interrupting any other table’s dining experience; I’ve never been asked to put my camera away. It’s become something along the lines of second nature to me at this point. Why do I do this? It’s partly out of a post-graduate-student nervous-tic sort of thing, to continue to document and archive my daily life. And it’s partly out of sheer technological ease: I probably wouldn’t do this with a regular film camera. But I do it mainly because I love food, and I want to remember all the good (and bad) things I’ve eaten. The visual component to food cannot be denied; plating and presentation at a reasonably decent restaurant are carefully-thought-out processes; at some places, it’s something of an art form. But even more fundamentally: food itself can be an art form. Even at places that just dole out the hot noodles with Taylorist efficiency, the interplay of textures and colors makes for something really quite lovely; the visual experience adds another dimension, another layer of depth and complexity, to an oftentimes already wonderful and sensual unfolding. And a photograph can capture that in a way that the other senses can only do ephemerally. Truth be told, my rather profound love of food – both eating and photographing it – is no doubt in part me overcompensating for what I (un)lovingly think of as the lost years: a combination of questionable dining hall fare in college, minimal meat consumption, and then, in my early grad school years, what I’ll euphemistically refer to as an aversion to ingesting fat. Or calories. The road back from my slightly antagonistic relationship to food took a while (and not made much easier by living in the middle of nowhere – sorry, Ithaca), but I’m pretty happy that I finally got to a place where I can’t stop thinking about when/where/how I’m going to eat pork belly again. In that regard, my taking pictures of food is something of a badge of honor – a daily reminder/reflection of finally being in a place, literally and mentally, where the pleasures of food can be experienced in so many – and such lasting – ways.

1 comment:

Goes On Runs said...

i think you take great photos of amazing food... it makes me want to eat out WAY more that i do...