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There's something about Martin Parr's hard-flashed, bright and colorful but totally inedible food photos that keeps you coming back for seconds. The more you look at them, the more you realize that even food beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The Magnum photographer's new book, Real Food (Phaidon), is a collection of food photographs taken on various assignments since 1994, including many from his hilariously drab "British Food" series, and his technicolor Mexico and Japan books.
Presented without captions, and with location notes located in an index at the end that discourages even trying to match photo with place, Parr avoids judging his subjects and doesn't seem to want you to, either. The only people in this book are headless bodies, holding turkey legs. It isn't a political statement on obesity or GMOs or whatever food issue you're looking to label, it's a documentary of dinner, lunch, breakfast, and dessert—check, please. "I'm not an intellectual," he told me, "I'm just intuitive." In the way we zoom our finger around a menu, he takes photos based on his gut, too. Though he admitted, there is bias toward junk food, which is just more "interesting" to photograph. "Posh food looks too much like magazines," he explained, and don't we know it. "This is real food," said Parr, "as opposed to food looking incredibly pleasant. Magazines are about selling food, recipes, a concept. Here, there's nothing to sell.".
So if you're ever experiencing fatigue from the effortfully perfect, always well-lit buffet of #foodporn on Instagram, or hey, in these pages—here's your antidote.
"I can't tell you what a good picture is, you just know it when you see it," Parr said. This photo was originally part of his Mexico book.
"Generally people are pretty accommodating," Parr said of his spontaneous photos, though "it's easier to photograph a plate of food than someone's face."
"Japanese food is irresistible—a lot of it's plastic," Parr warned of his photos taken there,
"One thing that's happened since I started shooting this was that people now photograph their food at restaurants, some restaurants here actually ban people taking photos, it's too much of a distraction," said Parr, who welcomes the change if it means more people are interested in photography.
"I like junk food, things like chips. And I like posh food. I like all kinds of food, I'm very democratic when it comes to food," said Parr.
"The biggest insult is to tell a Canadian that [their food] is very similar to America," said Parr, who compared Canadian cuisine to, well, America's.
"You don't see [meat spread sandwiches] so much now, but when I was a kid," recalled Parr, "people had meat spread more. It's quite tasty! It's meaty and pasty at the same time. They have great food in Scotland, too."
Real Food spans continents and decades, but Parr rarely remembers what was happening at the times of specific photos. "I'm not an intellectual, I'm just intuitive," he said.
