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My buddy Matt Knudsen has a great podcast called Grabbing Lunch. The title, and the explanation are the same and brilliantly simple. You go to lunch with Matt and he records it. This episode was with another buddy Rawle D. Lewis and me. The link is below. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
That this photo exists in this day and age is a mystery. A shop that hopes you will spend money to eat within its walls tries to entice you with a cheese sandwich on white bread. To be fair the lettuce looks fresh and the fairness ends there. I have the muscle memory of me trying to power down a dry cheese sandwich in the dark of my kitchen after a night out when I had nothing to eat.
This is a photo of a small businessman with low self esteem. It’s like a headshot where the actor didn’t re-book the shoot and has a black eye in the photo. This is a pre-Photoshop hypothetical. Maybe this shot is pre-Photoshop. Today they could photoshop some char marks from a toaster, some turkey hanging over the edge of the bread, maybe a healthy looking pickle across the bottom. Or they could have made an edible sandwich from their menu and taken a decent picture of it. The problem starts on the prep-board. How ’bout the choice of bread?
In fashion, the choices an art director makes affects the finished product. On the set of this shoot no one mentioned a Kaiser roll? Onion Bagel? Focaccia? Multi-Grain? A freakin’ Pita pocket? No. They stood around the table after a guy with a dirty apron, looking like Paulie from Rocky, plunked down the sandwich and said, “There. Now take the picture and bring it to Kinko’s and get back to work, I’m not paying you to play Picasso.”
Sometimes the style over substance ethos is a good thing. The knock on shallow people is that they worry too much about outward appearances, what’s the opposite of that, being deep or looking like you don’t give a shit? Having no style is a cheese sandwich.
We are living in the megaphone era. Every minute activity must be broadcast in all forms of media and in rapid, real time. The assumption being that anyone cares. To be fair some people do care, but most just get mildly pissed off when they absent-mindedly scroll across the fact that you found a Jamba Juice in your neighborhood.
One of the more ubiquitous forms of broadcasting ourselves is the food porn photo. In an earlier post I was critical of the celebrity showcase of homes and this is our version of it. “Hey, look what I’m eating, it’s probably better than what you’re eating.” I hate to say I’ve done it, but it is a mild regret and not a major shame.
The food photo is probably a shot of sushi 80% of the time, it’s artistic, has great color and texture, it’s also expensive so it’s got a flaunt factor. You seldom see a photo of people at a buffet loading up on stuffing and spare ribs, but that might tell a more accurate story.
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Copyright © 2012 Carl De Gregorio. All Rights Reserved.
