"All You Have To Do" is an instructional heading taken from Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook, first published in 1950. This post-war period sees a proliferation of colour photographs in cookbooks, the language of which are increasingly aspirational. Food is often presented as a visual spectacle in lavish settings, conjuring shared domestic fantasies.
This trend continues today in printed media and on TV, and increasingly on social media, the latest shop window for aspirational domesticity. Online, we perform a carefully crafted and curated version of our lives. We are no longer passive consumers of the aspirational image; we are content creators who perpetuate and participate in myth-making.
The work is a collection of still and moving images which reference the visual language and style of post-war western cookbooks. The project attempts to contextualise these images through the prism of contemporary visual culture, by borrowing from the conventions of web-based image production and presenting the work in an online format.
This work explores the anxieties generated by mainstream food images, and questions the nature of aspiration in relation to visual food practices. In visual culture, the depiction of food is often divorced from the act of eating or nourishment and is linked instead to a demonstration of wealth, social status, and projected identity. Images are often positioned as an outward performance with the attendant implication of judgement by others. To put one's home, lifestyle and food practices online is to risk demonstrating socio-economic or cultural inferiority.
This work was exhibited online as part of the Food Matters and Materialities: Critical Understandings of Food Cultures conference, held at Carleton University, Canada, in September 2021 (link to virtual gallery).
Food Matters and Materialities: Critical Understanding of Food Cultures conference exhibition
