Food Photography in the Late 20th Century Cookbook

Rationing was abolished in 1954, new food trends started to emerge with processed, fast meals, significantly changing Britain's approach to home cooking.

photography George De Gennaro began taking images of food in the 1950s. He commented in a magazine called 'Food in Focus':

"in those days, the pictures looked as though they were taken from the top of a ladder, six or eight feet away. and the food was so artificially doctored up that it gave the profession a horrible name"

Food photography was not taken seriously as an art genre. 

George De Gennaro was directly influenced by still life painters and as a regular contributor to "Better Homes and Garden" magazine in the 1970s.

He chose to capture food from a different angle, coming in close and capturing movement. 

The price of colour reproductions greatly affected how many colour pictures appeared in cookbooks and magazines. 

Much easier and cheaper to produce line drawings than colour photographs. 

At the start of the 1950s  cookbooks tended to have illustrations and black and white photographs. What some magazines and cookbooks would do, is they would have every photo done in black and white, and then at the beginning of each chapter they would have a coloured image, as this was much cheaper to do as colour printing was so expensive. 

1960s, colour photographs seemed to be more prevalent, seen in Mrs Beeton's "All About Cookery".

The aesthetics of food images at this time are interesting to consider. Ice cream was substituted with mash potatoes and papier-mâché mock ups were sometimes use instead of really poultry. this was due to the heat of the studio lights but as cameras and film speed and sensitivity improved, more genuine food products were used. 

Food trends were reflected in current trends in society, particularly by the rise of cookbooks in the mid-20th Century.

Before 1977, nothing had been written on the significance or importance of food photography and the symbols used in advertising photography. Roland Barthes wrote an interesting analysis of Panzani advertisement highlighting the importance of images used in advertisement. 

He looked at the food image in terms of signs and how we decode that sign, referring to the associations given by the choice of props, colour and composition. It is the actuality that seems to be the general rule for food photographers when producing images. 

 There were radical changes in food photography in the late 1970s to the early 1980s, transformed by Japanese colour printing which gave much better clarity of colour to the images. 

These technical advances modernised colour printing, more yellow used meant that blank ink reduced, making the coloured images brighter and bolder. 

The technique was so significant that in 1982, homemaking guru Martha Stewart in sited not only on Japanese printing, but also on photographs of every dish for her first book, "Entertaining". As a caterer she knew that the viewer's sense of taste was heavily influenced by the look of the food. 

It was at this time that magazines were made focusing just on food, started appearing in the late 1980s.

Food photographers take influence by still life paintings, in terms of realism, effects of light, composition and arrangement.