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SELF-PORTRAIT WITH EIGHTY CAKES, 2008 TIM WALKER

Food porn is still a thing, right? Visit any bookshop and you will find table upon table, shelf upon shelf of high-end cookery books that shimmer with the promise of culinary fulfilment.

At first glance Tim Walker’s self-portrait with cakes fits into this tradition. But look again. So many cakes. Could you really eat all of them? Isn’t this a vision of excess? Having your cake, eating it and still having more than enough left over? Enough to sicken you maybe?

“Photographs are rarely just about food,” Susan Bright writes in the introduction of new book Feast for the Eyes, from which Walker’s photograph is taken. “They hold our lives and time up to the light.”

No surprise, then, that so many photographers have chosen food as a theme. Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography does what it says on the tin. As the book shows, photographers including Man Ray, Edward Weston, Irving Penn, Cindy Sherman and, yes, Tim Walker have all turned their eye to the stuff we eat. All tastes catered for, you might say. And yes some of it is food porn, while some of it deconstructs the very idea.

That said, the result, it has to be said, often looks edible. Another slice of cake anyone?

Tim Walker, Self-Portrait with Eighty Cakes, 2008; from Feast for the Eyes (Aperture, 2017)