9 x 12: The Adventure Continues - Chapter 3

The Art of Food

If food photography is seduction, where does the inspiration for those creations come from? This was the question I pondered while preparing a talk entitled The Art of Food for The Santa Barbara Museum of Art in advance of the release of my new book later this year. I thought a lot about the mechanics of creation, but not necessarily the source. Researching material for the talk led me to a visual retrospective, and I realized, looking at this kaleidoscope of images spanning nearly six decades, that inspiration is often indirect and subliminal.

My journey down memory lane started in London, my hometown. I have distinct sensory sensations related to my childhood there, many of them linked to inclement weather. It was wet, damp, and cold all the time. There's a smell of wet wool that I can't quite get out of my mind. This was not a good smell, by the way; it lingered all day as everyone tried, in vain, to dry their clothes. I have fleeting images of paraffin heaters being moved from room to room, walking to school and watching your hand fade in the fog stretched out in front of you, running across the heath in the biting wind, and absolutely hideous school lunches. The predominant color in all the images is a grey palette. And yet…

Yours truly, running across Hampstead Heath, London on a rare day when it wasn’t pouring with rain.

London at that time was also home to a social and artistic explosion of pushing boundaries based on class, economic freedom, and breaking sexual taboos. It was the swinging sixties. London was the epicenter of music, fashion, and art, and much of it exploded with color. It was the time of David Bailey, Jean Shrimpton, Twiggy, Mary Quant, Biba, Carnaby Street, miniskirts and minis, gogo boots and Dusty Springfield, The Beatles, The Kinks, The Who and The Rolling Stones, of Terrance Conran, David Hockney, and Peter Blake. It was the moment when everything let loose.

Our house may have been built in the 1880s, but the inside had been modernized by my parents, who both embraced every aspect of this modern life and art movement. Both had grown up in formal, strict households governed by a generation who had grown up at the turn of the 20th century. Our life in London was very different.