“(Not) Food Porn: From Feed to Culture” exhibition: Photography in Context

Get to know the artists behind the Der Greif “(Not) Food Porn: From Feed to Culture” online exhibition

Today is the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste and we’re launching this months’ Pulse online exhibition “(Not) Food Porn: From Feed to Culture”. Bringing together eleven positions, we question how food is perceived across visual culture as the fetish or fascination for "food porn", which has transformed how we perceive, desire, and celebrate what we eat.

Highly stylized imagery exposes abundance, perfection, and excess, even as opposing social media trends lean into raw, unedited food aesthetics. Yet behind these mediated images lies a stark reality: massive global food waste and rapidly shifting cultural relationships to sustenance.

Starting with Eva Vei’s painterly still lifes in the series “Touch the Floor and Lick Your Finger,” we explore food through ‘germophobia’, or the fear of contamination, as it relates to food. Following in the tradition of “memento mori” paintings, which symbolize death, decay and rot, Vei’s photographs desaturate this visual imagery, isolating the subjects and presenting them as controlled objects. This reflects the fear of contamination, which can lead to selective eating, whereby only certain parts of food or surfaces are consumed while those that have come into contact with what is considered contaminated are rejected.

Continuing the theme of still lifes, we come across the work of Glenna Jennings and Jalisa Robinson, who collaborate as the Desert Kitchen Collective. They work across art, photography, and socially engaged practice. Their work on food justice draws on the history of community organising, exploring how images can reflect, change and complicate social conditions through material and perceptual means. For example, their series “The Price of Eggs” comprises constructed egg images, archival images, maps and newspaper fragments connected to places where they live and eat. Each piece begins with a local neighbourhood classified on a 1937 redlining map according to perceived desirability and residential risk. These classifications then become the basis for small sets in which the histories of property, consumption, and belonging intersect with the peculiar physicality of an egg.

Naomi Livia’s series, “Fried Egg Portraits”, features close-up shots of fried eggs alongside related chatroom texts and a sponge. In 1995, she fried and photographed eggs using an analogue, large-format view camera. She did this to explore the performative nature of domestic life, combining it with screenshots of chatroom texts from MUDs, a significant part of 1990s internet culture and socialisation, she explains. These were dungeon-like environments, originally text-based multiplayer games in the style of Dungeons & Dragons, in which she had a character called Egg that interacted with bots and human users.

Similarly, Thomas Nondh Jansen explores the concept of domesticity, transforming everyday objects and food into odd and new creations. Using universal products and 'ingredients' that are found in almost every household, he questions the meaning of home in Dutch culture. He addresses 'Dutchness' from the perspective of food culture and the visual tradition of food still lifes from the Dutch modern paintings.

In her project, “The Museum of Disobedience”, Paloma Passetto de Souza expands beyond the photographic medium into sculpture and installation. The result is a museum that exists in the imagination and in the moment, honouring oral histories and traditions of epistemic disobedience through ritualistic practices that act as a disruptive force against cultural oppression, celebrating ancestral knowledge. The sculptures are made of food, and the pinhole cameras are made of fresh fruit. Substituting food for clay in traditional sculptural practice is informed by the ritualistic nature of eating as a means of bonding and forming connections within the immigrant experience.

In “I Do Not Want to Become My Mother”, Stefanie Langenhoven explores her complex relationship with her mother, which was shaped by societal expectations and limitations placed on women in South African culture during the apartheid era. Archival images from food magazines and family albums intertwine with performative self-portraits, resulting in a complex visual narrative that is sometimes deceptively quiet and normal, and sometimes eerie and unstable.

Through a street photography approach, Teresa Menka captures the vibrant rhythm of street food culture across Ghanaian identity. Her lens moves past static meals to reveal the human interactions built around street cooking and food stands. Almost sensorial in its raw dimension of portraying street life, “We eat with our eyes” floats between the public and private dimension of food across places.

Nastya Platinova “Milk Bars” is a pensive story on the evolving role in everyday post-Soviet life. Once simple places to enjoy cheap, familiar meals, these venues now evoke a surreal sense of nostalgia. The photographs capture the disappearing social aspect that developed around these places, where food was a daily experience and a necessity, as well as a highly cultural form of bonding with memory, inheritance and identity.

Carlos Del Río-Bermúdez’s “Good Gravy” is a long term project started as an experimental research on 35 mm developing practices. By brewing, boiling, baking, and fermenting film emulsions, heat and time trigger unpredictable chemical reactions. The resulting images are not photos of food, but photographs physically transformed by it. Recipes and local ingredients conceptually link with each subject to explore territories, food, and cultural symbols.

“What will our culinary future look like?” asks Caroline Heinecke with her project “Future Food”. As the food industry is constantly evolving through new flavours, improved presentation, and innovative production processes, where does ethics lie in this trajectory? Heinecke interviewed experts from the culinary world about their vision for the future of food and using VQGAN, a generative neural network that produces images resembling real-life ones, she generated visual concepts which she then recreated in the studio, amongst other places, and captured photographically.

Chloe Dichter’s prints transform archive family photographs into images of the foods she grew up with. Although her work is firmly rooted in Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine, she also enjoyed stereotypical American delicacies such as Kraft cheese singles, a theme that features recurrently in her imagery. Although she connects with her cultures through the food she grew up with, the prints render the food inedible in the present, unappetizing. The body, remembrance and ancestral connections surface through food, but these memories are still ephemeral and changeable, soon to expire as the food they appear on.