Instagram, eat your heart out

The internet is jam-packed with food photography. But, says Iona McLaren, the professionals turn it into an art form

There are nearly six million photographs on Instagram labelled “avocado”. And that’s nothing. There are 26 million labelled “pizza”, 29 million labelled “wine” and 63 million labelled, rightly or wrongly, “delicious”. A movie star’s picture of toast may now get more thumbs-up in an hour than Marilyn Monroe got fan letters in her lifetime, and it’s no longer eccentric to photograph your aeroplane lunch.

In short, we’ve never been so keen on taking pictures of our food, and Wladimir Schohin’s handsome portrait of a boiled egg, its soft yolk broached, is just the sort of “close-up of my half-eaten dish” that camera telephones have made ubiquitous. As it happens, though, it was taken in 1910, a tour de force in autochrome, a fragile early method of colour printing.

For pioneering photographers, as Susan Bright explains in Feast for the Eyes: the Story of Food in Photography, the egg made a good muse: “deceptively difficult… to light, place and photograph”. A well-captured egg became a “cliché of photographic still lifes… a symbol of the [artist’s] prowess”. And in the 1950s, when the MIT professor Harold Edgerton wanted to see whether his stroboscope could capture movement too quick for the eye to see, it was food he enlisted, too, taking Milk Drop Coronet; later on, a bullet going through a banana.

Food – of any sort – is not just a good practice subject. It was also part of early photography’s anxious case to be considered art. In the 19th century, elaborate set-ups of fruit and wine – none more lavish than those of Roger Fenton in the 1860s – mimicked the still lifes of the Dutch Golden Age in largerthan-life prints, for which there was a vogue, before the advent of massproduced photographs in the 20th century cheapened their allure.

Apart from its shapely appeal for an artist, food is also a good way of looking at people. Sometimes it can be a proxy or a visual pun. Edward Weston could make a rippling pepper look like a Michelangelo torso, and there’s a whole strain of photography that does to food what Georgia O’Keeffe did to flowers, like Hannah Collins’s 1992 monochrome picture of a pile of oysters, called Sex 2, Plural/Wet. But it is also what people do with food that can be telling. Weegee, in 1940s New York, photographed lone men stuffing themselves with pasta, and Martin Parr more recently has exhibited thousands of images of awkward tea parties, dropped seaside ices or things like Pink Pig Cakes: food that is thought somehow tacky or kitsch.

But although Parr makes food a barometer of a class or an era, it doesn’t have to be. Some artists just use it as “a common language... to create a bond with the spectator,” as Sandy Skoglund said of her work in the 1970s. “After all, everyone eats.”