Are you going to eat that? Instagram Food Photography and the Dutch Still Life
By: Emma Jones
Tags: Photography, Art, Painting, Social Media, Food

Aesthetics and construction

It is because of this apparent easy vision of consumption that the Instagram food photograph is derided. By suggesting that “WE HAVE THINGS THAT YOU CAN INSTAGRAM” the London Grind sign was also a joke. It implied that the experience of eating has been replaced by the capturing of that experience, a visualisation an empty and vacuous culture that views life as collectable and consumable.

However, this argument is only viable if you look at the food photograph from a cool distance, with a cynicism that has become ubiquitous in contemporary society. We should perhaps not be so quick to dismiss the Instagram food photograph as simply capturing experience, reflecting the wealth and status of the account owner. Instead, if approached with an interest in aesthetics we can see the Instagram food photograph as an art object, and understand it as a construction and, therefore, no longer representative of a lifestyle to be envied.

Still Life works display playfulness with form, a purposeful use of space and an almost incomprehensible understanding of light. These are not ‘natural’ works but, rather, purposefully constructed; take, for example, the slightly raised viewpoint, repetition of ovals, and central triangle created by the angles of cutlery in Pieter Claesz’ Still Life (c. 1625). So too, in this painting, as in many others of the period, is the table scene depicted as already visited. In the Dutch and Flemish Still Life the loaf of bread is already cut, the lemon peeled and the wine glass half full. And yet, there are no chairs. We are not invited to eat, but to look.

In both the Still Life and the Instagram food photograph foodstuff is immortalised in paint and pixel. Unlike real food, that will soften and rot, the food photograph and Still Life exist as separate entities. The physician Hippocrates stated that “Life is Short, Art is Long” and it is this maxim that was embraced by the Dutch and Flemish Still Life painters of the seventeenth century. It is this maxim too, that could be applied to the Instagram food photograph, as an embrace of aesthetics, as a way to actually rebel against a concept of experience that, as Mark Greif, suggests “gives us the feeling we are really living, but makes us unsatisfied with whatever life we obtain.” [4]

Greif writes beautifully on aestheticism, defining it as something that “believes that art is essentially an occasion for the arousal of emotions and passions. You experience a work of art. You go into it. Not just a calm onlooker, you imagine the figures in the painting, and relish the colours and forms, the style becoming as much an object of experience as the content; you feel or taste everything; you lust for it, let it overwhelm you, amplify it to titillate or satisfy or disgust you; you mentally twist the canvas to wring it dry”.

Aestheticism, however, can be applied beyond art, even to something as seemingly banal and ephemeral as the Instagram food photograph. Instead of focusing on the experience and lifestyle of the photographer, let us instead think of the construction of the image. The strawberry toast on kimberleyhasselbrink’s feed is pictured on two plates, one pink and one a slightly marbled white. The table is white but not smooth, appearing more like canvas. The two plates do not meet in the middle, and the gap between them creates a curved leading line. The toast itself is irregularly cut, and the strawberries on top are messily arranged, providing disarray and a splash of colour to the otherwise muted palette.

By viewing the Instagram food photograph in this way we can ‘wring’ the canvas dry. Instead of an experience captured and consumed, the photograph and the Still Life painting invites us to consider construction and the mimicry of nature, whilst also allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by life as art. I think back to the nectarine, which has travelled so far to reach me. Then, cutting into it, I notice its blush, the colour of joy, spilling onto the black countertop on a grey London day, filling it with a mottled orange and red.