In Focus: Tasteful Pictures

Getty Center, Los Angeles

Through Aug. 22

The widespread use of cell phone cameras has created a trend among some bloggers, who photograph their meals and post the images online, said Mary MacVean in the Los Angeles Times. With such a smorgasbord available on the Internet, “it might seem a little ho-hum to stage a museum show of food photography.” Yet the Getty Center’s elegant new exhibition shows that today’s food bloggers are working in a surprisingly grand tradition. Soon after the invention of photography, its first practitioners began creating “meticulously staged still lifes,” such as Adolphe Braun’s 1867 image, meant to suggest a completed hunt. Images like Braun’s, which “presents a boar posed with its snout to the ground, between vine-covered branches,” usually borrowed their themes and composition from painting.

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Photographers of the 20th century were similarly inspired by movements in painting—in their case, abstraction, said Lisa Bramen in Smithsonian.com. With the invention of the handheld camera, “artists were suddenly freed to point their lenses up, down, or tilted at an angle.” Works such as Edward Weston’s Bananas (1930) and Edward Quigley’s Peas in a Pod (1935) show the produce of their titles at unfamiliar angles or “enlarged to monumental size.” Portable cameras also permitted new forms of documentary photography, and “food was just one of the aspects of life” that its practitioners captured. “Walker Evans’ 1929 image of a fruit-and-vegetable cart captures a way of life that would soon be replaced by supermarkets.” It makes an interesting contrast with William Eggleston’s Memphis (1971), which shows a frosty freezer stuffed full of prepackaged portions: “a contemporary portrait in processed meals.”