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Edward Weston's Food Photography, Photos from a Different Era

Food photography is a broad term, and you could say it happens everytime someone films a program for Food Network, hires a food stylist for their cookbook photographs, or even takes a picture of friends at dinner, pointing at their food with their tongues sticking out. Yes, this is all photography with food in it – but the idea of really getting up close to your food and having it represent something in photography has been going on for a long time.

Edward Weston, the California turned Mexico photographer, photographed his lover Margarite Mather, nudes in new positions, industrialized buildings of Ohio, the people of Mexico, and shells. Yet none of Weston’s photography caught me as much as his photography of food did.

All completed in the 1930s, I have seen three of his food photographs: Pepper #30, Artichoke Halved , and Cabbage Halved in my Modern Photography class. He also photographs mushrooms he calls “toadstools” and eggplants. When the professor changed to the slides of these images, they appeared on the large projector and onto the movie sized screen.

Weston’s photography gets to close to these images of vegetables that it takes a minute for the viewer to realize what they are really looking at. And, especially in the Pepper #30, it is almost impossible to think that this is the way these vegetables appeared in life, without Weston altering the composition and form. Many of his food photographs took on a life of their own, mimicking the human body, such as Pepper #30 looking like two bodies twisted together and their heads meeting at the top.

Surely technology has come so far that today’s food photographers are taking photographs of oranges with plastic eyeballs put on them too look like goofy faces and circulating them via e-mail. In an age where viewers take for granted the simplistic image of a piece of food or the still shot opening to an episode of Everyday Italian with Giada DeLaurentis, we must take a minute to look back to those who did it first – one of them being Edward Weston. 

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