decay # 47 ~ brazenly smutty food shot* / vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas

Pumpkin pie, mold, grapes • click to embiggenDuquesne Club CookbookOver the 35 years of my pro picture making career, I made hundreds of "brazenly smutty" food shots. Making such food pictures was a large part of my pictures for commerce life.

In many of those pictures, while the food was a featured player, the purpose of those pictures was to help sell a product other than the food - products such as CorningWare or French's condiments (French's Mustard), spices, and cooking/ baking products. Other food pictures where about the food itself - monthly restaurant reviews for Pittsburgh Magazine or recipes in the Duquense Club Cookbook (I made all of the pictures in the book as well as designing the book and supervising all the production). In any case, the food was always, first and foremost, picture perfect.

That written, it has been suggested by some that my decay pictures are a late-life rebellion against all of that brazenly smutty food shot stuff, a sort of Post-Traumatic Pictured Perfection Disorder. While there might be a deeply buried grain of truth in that notion, the idea of PTPPD belies the fact of my lifelong genuine interest in things decayed / decaying.

I can't fully explain the interest but the first word which comes to mind is patina, as in, a surface appearance of something grown beautiful especially with age or use . I am well aware many would take issue with the idea of beautiful being associated with decay. However, at least on the surface of things, that's how I see it.

That written, beneath the visual surface of things, I see a culture, based on non-sustainable consumption of the planet's resources, in a state of decay. I also also see much more than a smidgeon of Vanitas, a type of symbolic work of art associated with still life painters / painting in Flanders and the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Latin word means "vanity" and loosely translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits.

So, rather than just a case of PTPPD, perhaps my interest (at least my late life interest) in decay is also an up-close-and-personal expanded awareness of the transient nature of all earthly goods and things ... flowers wilt, food decays, and silver is of no use to the soul.

*phrase borrowed from Set the Stage, Then the Table ~ NYT, 11/20/12.

Comments

[Jimmi Nuffin]

Then you might be interested in this video, from the BBC, titled "Decay"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MCCP4fx0RE

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