This piece was originally published in The Inquisitive Eater Anthology, which you can now purchase online.
There are ways that you take pictures of food and ways that you do not.
It must be complimentary. Complimentary is the word of this job. The photographer says complimentary all the time. When he approves of something his assistants do he says they are doing ‘complimentary work,’ as if that is something people say to each other.
The assistant was told after her first day to make sure to wear complimentary clothes on the next. That was three months ago. She still doesn’t know what was meant by the word, but she started wearing all black and no one has said anything since.
Food should be moving. Food in motion is more appetizing than static food. Watch a tray of time-lapsed blueberry muffins rise and puff and brown in a spotless oven? Delicious. Roll a sequence of said muffins out of a gingham-lined country basket and down a hill? Wonderful. You want as few people involved in your food as possible. No one can be seen to place the tray in the oven, no one can be tipping over the country basket. It must be as if these muffins have willed themselves into baking; are frolicking of their own accord in the yard. Above all, you do not want anyone eating the food. Eating is the worst thing you can do to food. Eating destroys the magic of food. Eating is counter to the very nature of the food itself.
The assistant spends the morning with a towel meant for cleaning the lenses of cameras but instead she is polishing forks clean of the smudges and fingerprints left from the props department. The props department is filthy. The assistant then hands the forks to the more important assistant who then hands them to the photographer to figure out which fork he wants to use for this hamburger.
The director of the shoot and the photographer move across the room to have a long conversation about forks. While they are doing this the assistant puts all of the forks she is holding down on the table and the important assistant tells her she should probably not put the forks down. It isn’t complimentary if the forks are lying on the table. But the assistant makes no move to pick up the forks and the important assistant makes no move to pick up the forks. And so the forks lie there and the assistants stare down at them.
Eating is the worst thing you can do to food. Eating destroys the magic of food.
It is the first and only moment of quiet in the day. They stand over the forks on the table like they are gods looking down on a creation of forks. They look on the forks with a prim superiority until the photographer is back with the director and yelling at the assistants about putting down the forks. It is indeed not complimentary for the forks to lie in their natural state with the other forks on the table. The table will smudge the forks and the forks cannot be smudged. This is so important. This is the most important complimentary thing ever. There is nothing more complimentary than smudge-less forks.
When assembling a hamburger there has to be an exact amount of ketchup and mustard arranged so when a hand is pressing down on the top of the bun, the ketchup and the mustard ooze out at complimentary speeds. The nails of the hand should be painted but they cannot be painted the color of the ketchup or the mustard or the pickle. The hand cannot seem to be related at all to the hamburger, otherwise it will seem as though the hand is handling the hamburger and that is not what hands are meant to do. Hands are meant to only press down the top of the bun to allow the mustard and ketchup to do their thing. No freckled child is ever allowed to eat the hamburger and mug for the camera and say something like “Now that’s what I call a hamburger.” This will not happen. Not again. This is not the nineteen fifties.
The assistant has a degree in photography. She is an artist and this is not art. The more important assistant also has a degree in photography. He is also an artist. The assistant and the important assistant spend their lunch de-smudging the forks while the director and the photographer look over their shoulders to verify the cleanliness of the cutlery. The owner of the hand with the painted nails sits in her chair and thinks she is an actress. The owner of the nails also has a degree.
The lights of the studio heat the burgers, so the air is full of lunch. There are laws to photographing food that you are trying to sell. If you are selling cornflakes the flakes have to be real, but the milk can be glue. If you are selling milk the milk must be real and the flakes can be cardboard. If you are selling apples the apples must be apples and the rest of the table is wax. Burgers are the hardest to photograph because there are so many things that go into a burger and they all have to be real. The lettuce has to be lettuce, the tomato has to be a tomato, the meat must be meat. It is difficult to keep all of these things from rotting under the lights, to stop the filthy props department from eating the fries, to make sure that all the food is moving in syncopation.
If you are selling cornflakes the flakes have to be real, but the milk can be glue. If you are selling milk the milk must be real and the flakes can be cardboard.
After lunch, the laptop that is holding the images is tied to the camera by a cord. The assistant’s job is to move the computer around, following the more important assistant, whose job it is to move the camera. The photographer follows. No one is moving the photographer; he is moving himself.
The assistant’s friend from school did this same thing. He stood here for a while, moved computers, polished forks, adjusted backdrops. And then he talked to one of the executives standing in the background, and now he answers phones in the main office of the company that pays for the photographs to be taken. It is not the company that makes the hamburgers, it is a different company; it is a company that makes the desire for hamburgers. The assistant’s friend has a degree as well, but he is not touching his camera. He will. He definitely will.
Soon, he says over drinks after she is done with the forks and the computer. He’ll get back to it, he says. ‘Get back to it’ like it’s a half-finished lasagna in a freezer somewhere. She doesn’t believe him, she doesn’t know if she is supposed to believe him. She doesn’t know if he believes himself. But he’s more at ease than she is. He’s comfortable in his own skin. He seems to be sleeping well. He’s not drinking as much as she is. She’s also not touching her camera, but she doesn’t say this. She doesn’t say anything about art. Neither of them say anything about art. Art does not enter this world of pornography.
He talks about nothing at all, like the movies he’s seen, the TV he’s watching. She simply must be watching the TV, he says, it’s a golden age. Wasn’t the golden age three thousand years ago? She wonders. After the bronze age? After tin and steel wasn’t it gold? She says she doesn’t have time for TV. She has time to work late, to go out drinking with the crew, to collapse at night on her unwashed sheets, to wake up and start all over again. She has time to wash the unwashed sheets on the one day she has off. That is about it. Sometimes there is brunch in the middle of it all.
As she drinks, she is filled by the sounds of the bar around her. The straws that are sucking hard the sodas and vodkas, the bar snacks in bowls that are laid out. The happy hour offerings of tenders and wings and fries. It smells like the thousand lunches of the studio. She hears everyone eating. The sound of chewing. Gums and lips and tongues working food off the roofs of mouths. There is nothing more unappetizing than food while it is being eaten, she thinks.
Art does not enter this world of pornography.
She is worried this will happen to her, that one day she will be answering phones in an office and the conversation will turn to hiring a photographer to shoot something and she will mention, casually, that she went to school for photography. She will not say that she is a photographer; she will say she went to school for it. Everyone at this bar went to school for something. And no one here went to school for the thing they are doing, she realizes. She has a feeling that even the photographer of the hamburger went to school for something like architecture. Maybe that’s the trick, that we should study something opposite and larger than what we want to be doing. Do not steer the ship directly at the north star. Don’t hit the nail too squarely on the head. Don’t be obvious about it.
And this is why when you are taking photographs of food the food should be doing anything at all except being eaten. Because you don’t want to be obvious about your food. You don’t want to be direct about your desire for hamburgers. You don’t want to be direct about your desire for anything at all.
B.C. Edwards is the author of two books, The Aversive Clause and From The Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes. He has written for Mathematics Magazine, The New Limestone Review, The New York Times, and others. He was awarded the 2011 Hudson Prize for fiction and a 2014 Poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation of the Arts. He attended the graduate writing program at The New School in New York and lives in Brooklyn with his husband.
Featured image via PublicDomainPictures.net
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