Held by Essen Taste Magazine, fashion food magazine online, the event “Taste Exhibition” - coming soon - is an overview of lifestyle food photography talent, because food is one of the expressions of culture and it is worthy of investigation. The curators Charlotte Laura Garlaschelli e Federica Sala tell Swide all about it.

Why did you decide to have an exhibition of food photography right now?

The chance came up thanks to all the photos we received in response to the Lomography contest we launched. That gave us an idea of how much food photography has evolved lately and the exhibition is a spontaneous, three-dimensional  evolution  of the work we have done in the magazine through photography and food. That is why it is sort of like a preview of the first book publication we’ll are assembling to be published by Zeitgeist Editore, in the autumn.  

Can you tell us about the areas of the exhibition and why did you pick this categorisation?

The exhibition is organised like a stellar map that focuses on the new aspects of food photography: not only still life or cooking but also fashion food home food, kids, reportage and the relationship between food and architecture. They are different points of view on how food permeates everything and becomes an icon of the individual and collective lifestyle. 

 Carolina Amoretti, Totem Dolci, Still Life Category 

Who picked the location at Triennale?  Why?

Well, Triennale has been very open and collaborative from the beginning of the project and made available the big wall at the entrance, so to give food photography a more democratic legitimacy, to make it accessible to everyone.

How is the exhibition organised, curatorially speaking (the path, the dimension of the prints, scenography)

The Lomography contest’s images will be the vast majority but with small dimensions, whereas the authorial work commissioned to or photographers (Jennifer Abessira, Carolina Amoretti, Adrianna Glaviano, Nadia Moro, Kuba Dabrowski, Matteo Serri, Federico Garibaldi, Delfino Legnani Sisto, Claudia Zalla, Mara Corsino) will be printed in larger prints, although framed very minimally.

Federico Garibaldi, Liguria, Street Food Category 

Can you tell us about the participants? Many of them are Italians: does this come through in their photography?

About half of our photographers’s works are Italian but altogether the exhibition doesn’t represent the Italian way but moreover the personal approach to a universal topic such as the relationship between the individual and the food. Mara Corsino if Portorican, Jennifer Abessira is Israeli, Adrianna Glaviano is from the United States, Kuba Dabrowski is Polish…The works of Nadia Moro, Delfino Legnani and Claudia Zalla have an international connotation, so maybe the works of Matteo Serri and Federico Garibaldi (reportage) are the ones who most identify a national aesthetic.

 Matteo Serri, Reportage - Home Food Category 

About the Lomo photography, though, you can really get a sense of where the photographers are from, mostly the non professional ones, and we think it is one of the most interesting aspects because without focusing on the territorial origin or the contexts, you can spot the different areas of the world and get a sense of the different aesthetic in each country. You can’t take a Malesian image for an English one. 

 Mara Corsino, Fashion Food Category 

What is for you Food Photography and what does it communicat to the viewer?

The exhibition is focused on Lifestyle Food Photography, which we think is a precise field among the many forms of representation of food and that has gone through paintings and recipes’ images. The Lifestyle Food Photography exhibition recounts through images the iconographic evolution of how food belongs to daily life much more than anything else. It’s an ingredient of life but it’s also an element of people’s lifestyle. 

Can you mention some new talents (Italian or not) among Food Photography, not counting the ones on display?

People such as  Nick Haymes, Martina Della Valle, Michael Graydon, Anita Calero, Pierpaolo Ferrari, Mariano Herrera, Takashi Homma come to mind. We love Amiamo Elad Lassry to whom PAC will shortly dedicate a retrospective.

Food is the prism of a culture, of a society: what are the conclusions that you came to by organising this exhibition?

If we take into account the whole contest of Lomography and our professional photographers, one important conclusion is that the core of the exhibition is that ti is made of global contents on one way and authorial on the other, stressing more towards the experimentation.

Nadia Moro, Kids Category  

Let’s talk about the Lomography contest: can you tell us about the winner?

The contest didn’t have a specific topic to focus on except “everything that is considered food”. We got many different approaches not only because of the many forms of photography and the chance to photograph with analogic but also thanks to the different interpretation of food, the different cooking techniques, the very idea of what is edible, sometimes also the stories (that you can read on the website) together with the photos have resulted in something very interesting anthropologically speaking, apart from the culinary. The image won because of the harmonic composition and the well represented technique of double-crossed exposition, but we have received many beautiful images. 

A TASTE EXHIBITION

June 26th-July 22nd

Triennale di Milano

Viale Alemagna 6

Tel. 0039 02724341

 

Interview by: Elisa della Barba