jake.pictures

Ashley and I recently discovered that people did not know how to make pizza in the 40s and 50s. Par exemple:

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Tuna pizza with evaporated mile, strips of bacon with smatterings of american cheese; it seems like the pizza that we’ve come to recognize is pretty wildly different than what our predecessors may have expected.

In some ways, though, our hubris may be our down fall. Even with all of the advances in pizza technology we can still make mistakes.

One day, my brother-in-law shared with me an image of a poorly cut cardboard-looking pizza. It occurred to me at that point that Unsettling Food can come in many different forms. While I’ve been focusing on odd and oversized foods so far, I think that a common place, household favorite like pizza could be made to be unsettling with the proper cuts.

I want to aim to recreate aspects of this type of unsettling subject-matter: the kind that will make overly picky people who describe themselves as OCD perk up and take notice.

I think I will involve pineapple for good measure, as that seems to evoke strong feelings towards pizza as well.

One thing that I felt was missing last week was “hands.” Fortunately, I came across the periodical Gather recently, which features a series of images by Grant Cornett (food styling by Maggie Ruggiero). The images are in a very similar style to the type of photographs I’ve been attempting to recreate, with some additional overdone clarity edits, which I think add a nice effect. I would love to interact with Cornett at some point, as it seems like his images are doing a lot of what I’ve been attempting. The touching of the food in particular adds a sense of the unsettling that I would love to capture myself. Some example images follow.

The fingers in this picture are touching the lacquered lemon cake in kind of an odd and informal way, which I think adds to the visual interest. Photos by Grant Cornett.

I’m inviting some friends over for pizza, hoping that they will be comfortable featuring their hands for some images before feasting on some of the better cut/tasting slices.

As for last week and the Ostrich egg, I must say that I don’t think that it’s over yet. I still have one Ostrich egg and some goals to perfect some aspects of the picture. I think that the lace table cloth and the color of the picture had the effect of dating the image back even more than I had intended. It seems to have modernized the other images.