Why do people photograph food?

 Why do people photograph food?  For any number of reasons.

Mainly because it’s free.  Before digital photography you had to first pay for film and then pay again to get it processed, so people took a lot less photographs.  It was not unusual to see for the first and last photographs on the same roll of 24 exposures to be of Christmas – and not the of same Christmas (although chances are that ‘The Sound of Music’ would be visible on telly in the background in both shots.  ‘The Sound of Music’ at Christmas, ‘The Great Escape’ at Easter, those are the correct films for the major Christian festivals in the calendar).

In addition to cost, getting your film developed meant others saw your photographs (before the invention of digital photography the only way a 17 year old would see a picture of your drunk girlfriend naked was if he worked in Boots), and nobody wanted to be known as the Guy Who Takes Pictures of Chips.

With the advent of digital photography, we are free to take pictures of food, then e mail them to our friends to torture them by pointing out that they are not about to tuck into a huge portion of egg and chips.  Yum!  Or the weapons-grade variation, taking a picture of a mid-morning pint when on holiday and e mailing or texting it to a friend at around the time when you know they are at their most frazzled.

To a certain extent, the growing trend of photographing food has been driven by the illustrations in the growing pile of celebrity chef cookery books that continually clutter our kitchens.  Food porn is not, as you might rationally suspect, something to do with cucumbers or a bloke holding up a melon without using his hands, but a term used to describe luscious pictures of food intended to make the food look delicious, like the photographs in fast food joints convincing you that what’s in the cardboard container you have just been handed is luscious and plump and full of flavour, rather than simultaneously limp yet full of flavourings.

There’s something of an OCD aspect to all this too.  I can quite understand the pleasure one can take in, for instance, taking a picture of the occasional tasty looking dish or, even better, a surprising looking offering on a plate or, jackpot! a rudely shaped scoop of mash, and then e mailing it to your mate to compound the monotony of their day, but I can also imagine that there are people that delight in documenting everything that goes in their mouth. 

Knowing something of human nature from the internet, I strongly suspect that there are probably people who equally delight in documenting the other end of the process.  The next time you get all self conscious when you hear the distinctive click of a camera shutter in the next stall over in a public lavvie, just remember it may not be you who has just become an addition to some pervert’s album.  But it probably is.  In either case, screaming is perfectly acceptable.

The next step is blogging about your food and while there are probably a gazillion blogs where foodies exalt excellent cooking while pretending to be restaurant critics in the same way that kids wrap their sheds in tin foil and pretend to be astronauts, the most entertaining ones focus on the rougher end of the culinary experience, such as the ‘traction man’ blog that highlighted the problems with hospital food (starting with it being the last thing anyone feeling under the weather would want to be confronted with) or the excellent ‘no second helpings’.  Both blogs took pot shots at the establishment and attracted the attention of the national press in the way that some twat who wrings 1,000 words out of couscous never will.  I hope.

Food is life and people are recording more of their lives than ever, even the intimate – eating is putting something in your mouth – experiences.  On balance then, I’d rather see a recording of a pie than a sex tape, especially if it’s made by the sort of people who like pies.

Today's photography

'Today' is a cornerstone of BBC Radio Four's morning programming. Billed as a news and current events programme it would also be fair to describe it as a retirement home for a certain type of irritable old journalist who, if they were a member of your family, would be the uncle who lives on his own, ruins Christmas every year by being so bloody miserable and only brings you joy at the moment when you realise that he is not in fact cumodgney yet loveable like some character in a Disney family feature, but is in fact a proper pain in the arse and hey, you don't have to invite him round again, ever.

The presenters on today have a reputation for being 'fierce'. This is because you cannot call broadcasters 'rude', even if that's what they are. In my house, they are referred to as 'the breakfast nutters' because of their amazing ability to get upset about inconsequential things, usually technology stories that are about making life easier for pets.

Because I'm a rational type I now restrain myself to simply turning the radio off in disgust about once a week, rather than tossing the thing out the window, which is probably a more proportionate response to some of the asinine opinions expressed.

It's not just news and interviews though, the show has a couple of hours to fill every morning and you can't do that just by being rude to politicians, although you can tell that the presenters would like to give it a damn good try. No, the show also seems to report on an alarming number of new surveys that reveal something or other about the spam buying habits of the great British public or something equally important, and medical stories about new cures for the sort of maladies that affect their listeners, like irritability and bouts of depression.

The behaviour of the presenters does perform the essential service of getting the heart rate of the listener up to anaerobic levels first thing in the morning, the way that usually only a really good alarm clock or an earthquake can. Carefully maintained, one can be in a simmering rage all day, lasting until it's time to uncork dinner.

One of the stories that caught my attention the other morning was an apparent growing trend in funeral photography.

Now, I thought that the only people that took photographs at funerals were either the police, looking to get some pictures of family villains for the files, or intrusive press photographers who know that grief sells, especially when it's somebody else's.

My first reaction was one of mystified spluttering indignation. What sort of person hires a photographer for a funeral? Obviously, I thought, this is an effect of celebrity culture. People see grieving celebs in magazines and, just like the red carpet, want to 'get the look'. But apparently not so. It's all down to people wanting to remember a day that, for most of them, passes in something of a blur. So the funeral photographer.


Even as I tee'd up a 'the world has gone mad' rant, they wheeled on some history professor from a provincial poly to explain that this is, in fact, simply a revival of a Victorian practice. That the Victorians used to have funereal photographs is not really that much of a surprise, they loved black, and plumes, and heavy wooden furniture and so were a natural society for really liking death. Somewhat like goths, but with rickets, a work ethic and a shocking taste for gin.

Indeed there was a gathering of goths in Whitby not long ago that had, as one of the events, a Victorian funeral. God knows I was a moody a teen as anyone but at least I had the good manners to confine myself to my bedroom and not hang around graveyards looking glum.

So funeral photography is nothing new, although the photos are now in colour. Problem is though, as everyone is dressed in black, who's going to know?

100 days of Flickr

Certainly, there’s never any shortage of things to blog about. Pick up a newspaper, turn on the telly or even go for a walk and it’s a pretty good bet that there will be something that will push my outrage levels up from their background state of about 30% of outrage well into the red (quite an achievement to keep things in the visible spectrum I think). At the moment the trees are turning and it’s a gorgeous time to walk through the park. I could do that and try by best to describe the glorious golds and ambers of the autumn and how walking on a carpet of fallen leaves makes the same sort of scrunching noise you would expect from balling up paper with a poem about autumn written on it and flinging it into the bin. The post would probably end with a rant about dog poo.

In order to counter this predictability I wanted, for the next 100 days, to write 100 words a day based on a totally random image. I’d go to Flickr, click on the ‘uploaded in the last minute’ photograph and write 100 words on it. A story inspired by it, or an observation, or maybe just a whole load of questions. Maybe even caption it, like a photo and accompanying piece in a newspaper or magazine. At some point I fully intended to be faced with having to mock somebody’s wedding photographs or make hil-hairy-arse bestiality comments about pet photographs.

So day one, I go on line and the first photograph is this one:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/39909087@N03/4061342088/

It’s from this person’s photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/39909087@N03/

and has, basically, derailed the whole thing. First of all I feel like some sort of cross between a groomer and a stalker for looking at pictures of an adolescent girl who appears to be either in some medical facility or an eccentrically furnished home. Also, writing anything about that could not possibly be as interesting as the truth. Finally, inventing things about women is a great way to start a career not as a lovable Walter Mitty style character but the sort of fellow you see eventually being banged up for breaking into Meryl Streep’s house and insisting that you have been secretly married to her for years.

If it had been a picture of a sulky looking kid standing outside Graceland, I’d be up to 2,000 words by now, so one way or another, I don’t think I’ll be pursuing the idea.

Who's that girl...or is it a bloke?

Depending on your status as a celebrity and your relationship with the media, if you are famous you can expect to see pictures of yourself in the paper either smiling on some red carpet somewhere or reeling drunk in the gutter showing your knickers.

If you are famous you probably have your own file in the newspaper vault. If you are lucky this has pictures of you in clean, ironed clothes. If you are unlucky this has pictures of your cellulite. If you are really unlucky this has your police mug-shot and if dame fortune has crapped on you after embarking on a high-fibre diet, this will contain those ‘glamour’ shots you did at the start of your career.

Ordinary people pictured in the paper used to fall into three categories. You either looked startled as you walked to court and some snapper papped you, or you looked happy as you lifted some sort of trophy aloft, or you had a blanket over your head and the caption described you as ‘the accused’ or, possibly ‘the beast’.

The saddest photographs on front pages were those posed school photographs. You felt your heart drop into your shoes because you knew that the picture of the smiling child was not on the front page because it was a slow news day and the kid was related to the editor. When you saw a picture of an entire class, with nobody ringed, it was time to reach for the bottle. I guess class photographs were used because these were the ones most available to the journos, either from the parents or an underpaid school caretaker.

The internet has changed all that though. Recently, high-school gunmen have taken to putting their declarations of insanity on YouTube and so that’s where newspapers go for video grabs – although to be honest they could just have been using the same shot of some acne ridden git in a ‘slipknot’ hoodie, as that’s what all these kids look like.

Worse, they have started to comb social networking sites like MyFace for pictures of missing teens, tragic teens or teens that may well have done something nasty to other teens. This is why one should be careful about the photographs one puts into the public domain. Do you really want, next to the headline ‘suspect held in gnome theft case’, a picture of you simulating sex with a soft toy, because you thought it was a laugh to have it on your home page.

Worse still, do you want to rely on a lazy, pissed up journo getting the right image? The last thing you need is to have a name close to that of a notorious donkey shagger so that on his arrest you see that photograph of yourself taken last Christmas when you were playing twister after getting pissed and the caption ‘mule molester busted’.

So one should be careful what one posts, and what one does, and what one is pictured doing. Or simply emboss all pictures of yourself with the watermark: ‘in my defence, I had been drinking’.

Hugh Meanz Biznezz

A rather belated post here - I should have posted this a few weeks ago, when I had the idea for my Hero of the Week or Villain of the Week.

The Hero of the Week was Hugh Grant. The floppy haired ponce may have previously only barely cut it as the lead in a rom-com or two, but when he hurled those baked beans at that pap, he elevated his status to action hero.

There is something about gutter photographers that make you want to shove their cameras up their arses and hit the ‘zoom’ button. It used to be like organised crime, with a few paps sleazing their way around London, paying off bellboys and doormen to know who was staying where, eating where and sleeping where and with whom or what.

This was because you had one page in the paper that was to do with ‘showbiz’ and two magazines obsessed with celebrity, ‘Hello’ and ‘OK’.

Not any more. The papers are full of pages of photographs (well, maybe photograph is stretching it, grainy images is closer to the mark, I think we’re actually one step away from simply using Google Earth images of Madonna’s back garden and putting a red circle round the collection of shadows that might be her mowing the grass) of celebs.

Now it’s more like crimes of opportunity - photographic muggings. The photograph of choice a few months ago was the low level shot of women getting out of cabs. And the reaction…criticism that they were not wearing knickers. Have I missed something? Is not the reaction ‘hold on, who’s the pervert taking upskirt photographs. I’d like to see him try that on a crowded train.

That’s why the pictures are always grainy - because the celebs have stopped playing ball and are now playing ‘catch the tin can…in your teeth’.

Not that I read any of these papers or mags myself - it’s just that everyone on my train does and you occasionally can’t help but notice a shoddy picture of somebody you don’t recognise from some soap you don’t watch doing their shopping or something - that’s right, they have pictures of people shopping. The new low though is a mag I noticed that has, on the front cover, a promise to pay you for any celeb snaps you send in!

On the one hand I’m tempted to just go to Madam Tausaurds and make a fortune by putting a carrier bag in the hand of each waxwork (Madonna shops at Spar, Queen with a hold-all from Ann Summers). But I’m just as tempted to find out where the offices of the mag are and burn it down.

What I don’t like is this perversion of the role of the Citizen Journalist. It’s good that we all have mobiles with cameras, it’s bad that they can be used to photograph assaults on people in bus-stops or take pictures of shopping celebs.

If I’m ever shopping and see Hugh Grant lurking in the aisles, pondering what to have for tea, he may rest assured that I will not be pestering him for a photograph. Nor will I ask him to pass me the beans.