"photography" news and stories

I posted about edible landscapes yesterday, in reference to Carl Warner's photographs of happy broccoli forests and nifty Parmesan cheese villages.

Well reading more, I stumbled onto a site featuring English artist Gayle Chong Kwan, essentially Warner's darker twin. Kwan also makes and photographs edible landscapes, but hers are sinister, decaying. Think shadowy jungles of rotting lettuce, desolate icy wildernesses made of butter and lard. Kwan calls the project "Cockaigne," after a mythological glutton's paradise from the 14th century, where the streets are paved with pastry and the sky rains cheese. The photographs are intended as a critique of global tourism, consumerism and the quest for utopia. Heavy stuff, and startlingly beautiful.

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Broccoli forests sprouting from powdered cumin soil. A cauliflower coral reef. A pea pod boat drifting on a sunset sea of pink salmon.

London photographer Carl Warner constructs elaborate landscapes made completely of food, from mozzarella clouds to an entire village sculpted from chunks of Parmesan. There's a photo gallery of his work up on the BBC website. It looks look ultra-time consuming and amazingly cool.

We clearly have a deep-seated fascination with edible landscapes - think about the candy testing room in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with its lollipop plants and chocolate river, or the lunch pail trees in Return to Oz. Or remember the town of Chewandswallow, where it rained juice and snowed mashed potatoes in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a seminal text for the (4-year old) budding foodie?

Anyway, check out the photos. They'll have you gnawing on the nearest tree limb.

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Lora Zarubin's I Am Almost Always Hungry is a gorgeous book from cover to cover. I've had my copy for going on four years now and while I haven't actually made many of the recipes from the book, I love flipping through it for the section titles almost as much as the pictures (by Tess Traeger) and recipes. One of my personal favorites is the section called "I need more than comfort food tonight." The other wonderful thing about this book is that it is organized by season, which makes it an especially good resource if you are trying to eat locally and seasonally (just remember that these are the sorts of recipes that need to be read carefully before you dive in).

Oh, and a word about the photographs in this book. They are beautiful. Not just in your normal, food porn sort of way either. They are artistic and unique and I wish I had some of them framed on my walls. I particularly like the one on page 93 that is a shot of a dated handwritten recipe on a browning piece of paper.

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I've always been fascinated by how other people live their food lives. This means that I really enjoy cooking with friends, love peeking at the shopping cart contents of strangers and always wanted to check out what my co-workers brought to eat for lunch. This slightly odd trait of mine is why I'm loving a recent addition to my RSS reader.

Simply Breakfast is a site that gets updated just about every weekday (and occasionally on the weekend as well) and features a single image in each post. Every day the picture is of what Jen is having for breakfast that morning. In concept it sounds sort of boring, but Jen is an artist who seems to carefully compose her meal before she snaps the shot. The result is something that is inspiring, appealing and addictive. She's got a new book out that gathers a bunch of her breakfast images together and also has an Etsy shop where you can buy prints of her photos.

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Time magazine has a VERY cool slideshow up right now of famous chefs discussing the foods they'd like to eat as their last meals. Daniel Boulud would like to have whatever Alain Ducasse wanted to prepare for him. Mario Batali would like to go out in style with at least eight courses of Italian food. And Gary Danko would like something akin to a Greek or Roman banquet. All the photos and interviews are from the new book, My Last Supper, by Melanie Dunea.

[via Metafilter]

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