LOGO IMAGE

The Southeast Museum of Photography’s exhibition, Taken for Looks, Imaging Food in Contemporary Photography, takes a daunting view of the sustenance of our lives, not stopping for a breath before tossing up another discomfiting view of our most cherished culinary traditions.

Taken for Looks focuses exclusively on photography, bringing together an array of food images that probe our fantasies, our realities, our acts and our marks. Visual techniques and strategies traditionally associated with documentary, commercial and fine art photography cross-fertilize as each artist explores this fascinating subject in their own unique way. The make-believe and the actual become entwined to expose aspects of our confused and complex notions of desire. The viewer not only consumes the images but may also be overtaken by them; blurring the defining lines of consumer and consumed. Caught off-guard, we realize that we may have become the real subject of these images; and we may have been left with only the promise of fulfillment.

One significant trend in contemporary art is the blurring of boundaries—art and life, commercial and fine art, and within the field of fine art, the overturn of the traditional hierarchy that ranked mythological and political painting at the top and still life painting at the bottom. Current images of food form a particularly revealing nexus of food, fashion, and fiction. Rooted in everyday life and popular culture, they are immediately accessible. All of us eat and have associations of what, where, and how we eat. In the hands of image-makers, however, the familiar can become ambiguous resulting in ambivalent images, rich in open-ended meaning and feeling.

Martin Parr’s dizzying photomural installation of food, people, and places acts as a linchpin for the exhibition. The nearly 100 images from Common Sense revel in pop culture, and force issues of beauty, desire, class, and materialism. Inviting deciphering, the installation is a puzzle that challenges our very nature as human: “[Pigeons are] a great metaphor for human beings, especially when they’re pecking at junk food. So when I saw this pigeon with a fried chicken packet in Bedminster, …it was a natural picture.” And as the deadpan treatment of his subjects slips ever more seamlessly into critique, he has developed an uncanny ability to turn the familiar into the iconic.

About the Exhibition Curator:

Sarah Tanguy is a curator in the ART in Embassies Program, the curator of Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, and adjunct curator for International Arts & Artists, as well as an independent curator and critic based in Washington, DC. She has developed over 150 exhibitions, including Sandy Skoglund: Enchanting the Real (a 30-year survey of Skoglund’s food-related installations and photography), Food Matters: Explorations in Contemporary Art, Off the Press: Re-contextualizing the Newspaper in Contemporary Art, The View from Here, Landshapes, New Angles: Photographs by Andrey Chezhin, Sweet Tooth, From Start to Finish, and Tools as Art. In addition to exhibition-related essays, she has written for The Washington Times, Sculpture, New Art Examiner, Glass, American Craft, Metalsmith and numerous other national publications.

“Over and over again, the artists in Taken for Looks graft a fine art aesthetics onto our media saturated world… Whether they ask us to glance, eavesdrop, or take a clinical look at food, they makes us revisit our primal urges as they transfer the physical imprint of the photographic plate onto the virtual imprint in our imagination. Once their seductive tendrils unfurl, visions of plenty yield only empty calories. Life turns to decay and death, with no promise of renewal. Like Tantalus, who stole the Food of the Gods and shared them with humankind, and like his punishment (standing in a pool of water under a fruit tree with low branches), they condemn us to a fate of never quite being able to reach satisfaction.” Sarah Tanguy, The Ghost of Desire, Taken For Looks catalogue essay.

About the artists:

Meredith Allen

Meredith Allen lives and works in Brooklyn. Much of her work focuses on the subject of consumerism and the contemporary first-world conundrum: the more we buy, the less fun it is. Her photographs of popsicles and of other subjects like Beanie Babies, investigate those curious possessions that either become priceless relics or just simply “melt away”. Her photographs have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Armory Center For The Arts, Pasadena; the Paul Robeson Gallery, Rutgers University; Rotunda Gallery Brooklyn; The University of Arizona Museum of Art; the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; the Center for Photography at Woodstock; and at Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food & The Arts. Allen was born in Bangor, Maine and has a BFA in Photography from the University of Hartford and an MFA in Photography from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her work is held in the public collections of Harvard University’s School of Business, The Wichita Art Museum, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The New York Public Library and Levi Strauss Inc. Her awards and grants include a New York Foundation for the Arts in Photography; the Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant; and the Canon Award at the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.

Anita Calero

Anita Calero was born in Cali, Columbia and moved to New York City in 1982. She began her career as a stylist before deciding to pursue a photography career in 1992. Her photography has taken a commercial direction with assignments for home, food, and personal topics. Calero’s editorial clients include Brides, Domino, Elegant Bride, Elle, Elle a Tavola, German AD, Glamour, GQ, House Beautiful, Lexus, Nylon, Organic Style, RealSimple, Russian AD, Self, Shop Etc, Suede, Town & Country, 2wice and Vanity Fair. Her advertising and catalog clients include Aveda, Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdales, Crabtree & Evelyn, Estee Lauder, Fortunoff, Neiman Marcus, Takashimaya, Victoria’s Secret and Godiva.

Sharon Core

Sharon Core’s photographs of food in this exhibition are “re-enactments” of a series of early paintings by pop artist Wayne Thiebaud. Core creates meticulous still life constructions of cakes, pies and hotdogs in cool and luscious colors. These "edible live arrangements for the camera" are a mimetic homage. Based on various catalog reproductions and her own memories, each photograph is printed the size of the original painting. Core inverts the common practice of making a painting from a photograph and these resulting photographs simultaneously refer to both painterly illusionism and photographic reality. Sharon Core was born in New Orleans and holds a BFA in painting from The University of Georgia and an MFA in Photography from Yale University.

Tim Davis

The Retail series of photographs by Tim Davis was concerned with the contamination of privacy and consciousness by commercialism. His images in this series show the reflections of fast-food restaurant neon signs on the darkened windows of suburban houses. Davis has had twenty-eight group exhibitions since 1999 and twelve solo exhibitions, most recently Illuminations at Greenberg Van Doren in New York and Permanent Collection at the Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in Los Angeles.
He received his BA at Bard College, NY and an MFA from Yale University. “I think all my work comes out of a slightly smart-alecky urge not to see things the way I’m supposed to,” Tim Davis. Tim Davis was born in Malawi, Africa but now lives and works in New York. He is a poet and a photographer. 

Susan Eder and Craig Dennis

The collaborative duo of conceptual artists Susan Eder and Craig Dennis arrived at photography as a way to examine science and perceptual bias. Their work often has a pop art sensibility with a strong thread of humor. In Lineage: Banana Family a single banana is sliced into surgical cross sections that are posed against a black velvet background and photographed. The sequence of cross sections proceeds from one end of the banana to the other forming a family of banana faces. Their works mimics the fervor of "age of discovery" explorations of the natural world and other scientific inquiries with the pseudo-mapping of a species and an intense focus on specimens.

Susan Eder is a Washington, DC-based artist whose conceptual photography has been shown widely nationally and internationally. She was born in St. Louis and earned a BFA in printmaking at the University of Michigan and an MFA in Sculpture from Ohio State University. Her photographs question the underlying principles on which we structure our world. She has quoted Alfred North Whitehead: “It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.” Eder explains, “Whitehead’s characterization of intelligence is the kind to which I aspire: that which notices the surprising embedded in the everyday. Scientific investigation begins with the same attitude, and much of my work uses the implements and approaches of an intent and probing observer, one who experiments, dissects, compares.”

“Eder's photographs are frequently alluded to as “snapshots” but they are not. It is easy to understand the error because of their formal immediacy and their ordinary subject matter. In fact, her work is as carefully planned as a scientific experiment, and some photographs mimic scientific examinations or documentation…But Eder's work is never simple, although it often appears straightforward. And while she seems to be looking carefully at objects, images and creatures any citizen might encounter, her gaze is not merely the trained eye of the artist, but more like the paralyzing stare of the basilisk.” Quoted from Contemplating the Obvious by Martha McWilliams.

Craig Dennis received a BFA in Printmaking from the University of Michigan and an MFA in printmaking, photography and sculpture from Ohio State University. He is currently President and Co-Owner of Arts & Letters and was previously Assistant Professor of Art at Williams College, Massachusetts. He received a Professional Artist Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in 2005.  He exhibited with Susan Eder in several solo exhibitions including at the Marsha Mateyka Gallery in Washington, DC. in 2003 and 2005.

Doug Fitch and Mimi Oka

Doug Fitch was born in Philadelphia. He received an A.B. from Harvard in Visual Studies and studied filmmaking at the New School along with attending professional cooking school in Paris. He has received grants from the Asian Cultural Council and the Peter Ivers Fellowship-Artist in Residence at Harvard University. His professional work has ranged from theater and opera design, theater direction, architecture, furniture and photography.

Mimi Oka was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She received an A.B. in Government from Harvard University and a Graduate Diploma from La Varenne Cooking School in Paris. Her career has included financial arbitrage, professional cooking, writing, and theater production.

Mimi Oka and Doug Fitch work collaboratively to create multi-sensory dining experiences known as orphic feasts, site-specific sculpture, photographs of imagined eating experiences and works of art in edible media. Their recent projects include Trapeze, Prague, Picnic, Stockade Table, Digested Images, Happiness, Edible Still Life in Clay, Good Taste in Art, La Baguette Enorme en Gala, Ile Flottante, Underwater Dining, Dining Haul, Orphic Fodder and Luau Basquaise de Bum Bum. Their projects were recently the subject of the documentary Five Feelings About Food (Sweden/USA, 2005). The Land of Cockaigne is a reinterpretation of Brueghel's painting of the same name depicting a medieval fantasyland where food falls from the sky and no one has to work.

Justine Kurland

Justine Kurland's tableau photographs create a mythic world inhabited by sprite, adolescent girls. Half pixie, half teenage runaway, these girls embody the mind-set shared among young women of this age, one of empowerment, independence, camaraderie and intimacy. Kurland's vision of this band of outsiders as citizens of a new world of girls pervades all her work.

“Moments serene enough to be from a Claude Lorrain, staged beneath a freeway overpass or on the banks of a toxic swamp. Pastoral bathers wear concert-tour T-shirts; highway angels with dirty fingernails shoplift Oreos; Pre-Raphaelite nymphs capture hapless boys who've happened on the wrong glade. Each of Justine Kurland's photographs is a vignette from an ongoing narrative. Inspired by autobiography no less than by fairy tales, movies, Afterschool Specials, even painting in the Grand Manner, Justine's World is an idyll where fact melts into fiction, where every girl is beautiful and your friends always look out for you.” Meghan Dailey, A Thousand Words, Artforum, April 2000.

Justine Kurland was born in Warsaw, New York. She graduated from the MFA program at Yale and was included in the important 1999 exhibition Another Girl, Another Planet curated by Gregory Crewdson. Kurland’s work has been included in a number of other significant exhibitions including Acting Out-Invented Melodrama in Contemporary Photography, Neuberger Museum of Art; Beyond Big, Detroit Institute of Arts; Strangers, at the International Center of Photography, New York; Songs of Experience, Torch Gallery, Amsterdam; Justine Kurland-Golden Dawn, Emily Tsingou Gallery, London; Child In Time, the Gemeentemuseum, Netherlands; Flesh Tones – 100 Years of the Nude, Robert Mann Gallery, New York; Justine Kurland, at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Video Jam, at Palm Beach Contemporary Art; Settings and Players-Theatrical Ambiguity in American Photography, White Cube Gallery, London; Violence The True Way, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; Identities at Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels and Nothing In Common, Aurellio Fine Art, New York.

“Girls acquire an understanding of the world before they're ready for it, and it conflicts with their uneasy feelings about themselves. I want to unravel that angst, to prop them up. I say, "If Huck Finn did it, you can too. Build the raft, go." I really do bond with them, and the photographs are made collaboratively, which is what was so hard about the "fly-by" photography I did on my recent road trip…The iconography of travel and escape is everywhere in my photographs, and this journey was about being a teenage runaway, a narrative that runs through my work.” Justine Kurland quoted in A Thousand Words, Artforum, April 2000.

Laura Letinsky

Laura Letinsky was born in Ontario, Canada but now lives and works in Chicago where she is a Professor and Department Chair of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. She holds a BFA (Honors) in Photography from the University of Manitoba, and an MFA in Photography from Yale University. Her photographs focus mainly on the genre of Still Life and have their roots firmly embedded in the deep romanticism of traditional still life painting not merely in the history of this genre in photography. Her subjects are often very simple and commonplace materials and objects. In them, she demonstrates how the familiar can be rendered special and significant by the treatment that it's given.

Letinsky’s photographs have been exhibited at museums and galleries including the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; The Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Nederlands Foto Institute; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; the Cleveland Museum of Art; Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto; Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York; Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago; and Shine Gallery, London. Her work is held in numerous public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has received support from the Illinois Arts Council, Manitoba Arts Council and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

Zeva Oelbaum

Zeva Oelbaum is a New York-based photographer, specializing in still life and food. Her work is regularly featured in The New York Times Magazine, House Beautiful, Bon Appetit and Metropolitan Home. She has photographed more than 10 illustrated books, most recently for publishers Stewart, Tabori and Chang, Chronicle Books, and Harper Collins. Corporate Clients include Ann Taylor, Scalamandre, and Bath and Body Works. Her awards for photography include the Award of Excellence from Communication Arts Magazine in 1989 and 1995, and the Quill and Trowel Award of Excellence from The Garden Writers Association of America in 1993.

Her solo exhibitions have included Efflorescence: Photographs by Zeva Oelbaum, Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, NY, 2003; Botanical Journals, the Southeast Museum of Photography, and Flowers in Shadow: Photographs by Zeva Oelbaum, Cheekwood Botanic Hall, Nashville, Tennessee. Her photographs are in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Jewish Heritage, Banana Republic, Bloomingdale’s and The Polaroid Collection.  She is the author of Flowers in Shadow – A Photographer Rediscovers a Victorian Botanical Album (Rizzoli, 2002) and Blue Prints-The Natural World in Cyanotype Photographs (Rizzoli, 2002). A native of Kansas City, she has a BA degree in Anthropology from Brandeis University, and also teaches at The International Center of Photography in New York. She is resident of Montclair, New Jersey.

Martin Parr

British photographer Martin Parr has achieved wide acclaim for his witty, ascerbic and ironic views of the banal and grotesque in society. His unique sensibility and gaze, when applied to the terrain normally covered by earnest documentary photography, reveals a deep ambivalence about our consumer society and the life of the middle class. His major early series of social documentary work includes The Last Resort and Cost of Living and Cherry Blossom. Parr studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic. Since 1994, Martin Parr has been a member of the renowned photographic agency Magnum. In 2004, he was appointed Artistic Director of the International Photography Festival in Arles.

Parr’s Common Sense series, from which these nearly one hundred images are drawn, features a brash, lurid and graphic depiction of everyday objects. Every subject is given an identical visual treatment: close-cropped subject with garish, heightened color and his trademark sense of irony. His images are often edited and presented in installation-format groupings of cheap laser-jet prints.

Lyndon Wade

Lyndon Wade took a non-traditional approach to a photographic education by pursuing multiple apprenticeships, workshops and through self-teaching. He quickly developed sophisticated technical proficiencies and applied them to his own rapidly emerging visual style. He entered the commercial photography industry at a relatively early age. 

Wade’s vibrant compositions often represents a larger narrative in the space of a single incident by creating a halted motion of his subjects that suggests something akin to suspended animation. His unique ability to produce complete narrative concepts within single images or small series of images can achieve great effect by luring viewers into the piece but to then leave viewers to draw their own conclusions. His idiosyncratic approach finds inspiration in the multiple forms of contemporary visual culture and synthesizes elements of humor, fantasy, whimsy, and other influences in his attempt to distill grand ideas into tightly honed concepts. A photographer that is constantly accepting all manner of influence into his work, Wade’s commercial client list includes Best Buy, Nintendo, Nestle, Target, Channel 4London, Vox Vodka, Bed Bath & Beyond, Sonic, Lee Europe, Sierra Mist, Molson, Bally’s, Payless, Bayer, General Electric, Harper Collins, and Sprint.

Sample Exhibition Images: