Food photography

Food

The participation or criticism of food photography through phone applications such as Instagram and Facebook has been a relatively recent topic of interest to many users of social media, in which people usually participate in the discourse by taking and uploading their own images or by chastising those who do. The latter usually contextualizes it under mechanical photographic processes to highlight the ridiculousness of documenting meals one has eaten regardless of the format. Some users devote entire albums to this subject or they haphazardly photograph notable edibles before consumption of food cooked at home or purchased at a restaurant. Either way, uploading food images on these applications invites other users to participate by commenting or allows them to voyeuristically get a glimpse of another person’s daily life through what is traditionally an intimate activity shared among family and close friends.

What I want to discuss in my final blog post is how paralleling mechanical and digital photography is ridiculous in itself, and doing so to try to dismiss photographic evidence of edibles doesn’t make much sense as they are two different things. While I myself don’t photograph my meals it’s interesting to me that 1. photographing meals and food is a cultural phenomenon that happened with the commodification and widespread use of digital and mobile photography, and 2. some people vehemently hate it. My point being that using the example of documenting food during the era of mechanical photography never was ‘a thing,’ therefore it shouldn’t be a thing now in the digital era, and people who do it are idiots is not the most effective way to express discontent with it.

More food

Kenneth S. Calhoon’s article, Personal Effects: Rilke, Barthes, and the Matter of Photography, primarily discusses Rilke’s description of a photograph through Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, but there are interesting points regarding the photograph that is appropriate in the differentiation of a photo taken by a mechanical process and one taken digitally. To Barthes, “the photograph is “never anything but an antiphon of ‘Look,’ ‘See,’ ‘Here it is,”’ meaning that as a framed and permanently capture piece of what was, in essence, temporal within the linear progress of time, it draws attention to itself by existing to document that time and space (613 Calhoon). With the advent of digital photography and being free of the constraints and necessity of having to process a roll of film, the immediacy and antiphony has condensed considerably, especially within social media. For example, one can take and show multiple people a meal immediately before consumption on Facebook, thus sharing the same anticipation and eagerness other people have right before eating something that tastes great simultaneously. Whereas through a mechanical process the immediate desire to share what a person finds appealing is gone after the first bite and cannot be shared unless there is at least one other person there.

Along the same lines as Calhoon, Lutz P. Koepnick, in Photographs and Memories, also discusses holocaust memory and the way photography disrupts time through a framework of Walter Benjamin. He writes that “In some of the most incisive writing about emulsion-based photography, the photographic image was seen as a shock administered to the flow of time. The photographic camera, in the view of Walter Benjamin for instance, interrupts the ordinary continuum of history...and in this way [digital images] no longer allow us to conceive of history as continuous and linear and to see our present as a mere reproduction of the past,” which further solidifies my argument (98 Koepnick). Mechanically taken photographs have always adhered to time easier than digital through items such as date/time stamps, proof sheets, the physical linearness of a roll of a film, etc. Unlike the former process, it’s much easier to disrupt in digital photographs simply by editing, renaming or moving all the files to wherever and whenever you want.

Food, again

Ultimately, in the age of instant digital communication and social media photography has changed considerably and it becomes stubbornness if one refuses to acknowledge that to make an argument against something so innocuous as taking pictures of some food. Stop it, people! :(


Works Cited

Calhoon, Kenneth S. Personal Effects: Rilke, Barthes, and the Matter of Photography. MLN. Vol. 113, No. 3, German Issue (Apr., 1998), pp. 612-634. accessed http://0-www.jstor.org.library.simmons.edu/stable/3251161

Koepnick, Lutz P (2004). Photographs and Memories.  South Central review.  (ISSN: 0743-6831),  21 (1), p. 94. accessed http://0-muse.jhu.edu.library.simmons.edu/journals/south_central_review/v021/21.1koepnick.html