Summer 1965: Paul Levy on how we began to eat with our eyes
From the Observer, 30 July 2011
Food photography has changed a good deal since that old rogue Clement Freud was the Observer Magazine's cookery writer and people like me read him compulsively. But it hasn't got any wittier than this people-free image of a deconstructed picnic, with only the shooting stick and binoculars to tell you that we're off to the races. I don't believe we at the Observer ever used any of the shoe polish/gelatine/shaving foam for whipped cream tricks of the food photography trade. But like every article or cookery book published in the Delia era, we did go through a didactic phase when the purpose of the food image was not to amuse but to tell you how the finished recipe should look. We grew out of that when Angela Mason joined the magazine as food editor in the 1980s, and Ann Barr and I coined the word "foodie". Suddenly we began to acknowledge that food existed to be eaten, and people began to appear in the food pages, along with mangoes and radicchio. (I appeared on the cover a few times, once as Bacchus and once as Henry VIII.) At about the time that photorealist painting was in vogue, our food photography became hyperrealist. When Jane Grigson did her delightful last series Slow Down, Fast Food, we photographed a gigantic hamburger with an implausible bite taken out of it, our tasteful riposte to the cigarette-stubbed-out-in-the-fried-egg school of lurid food photography.
Paul Levy was the food and wine editor of the Observer for more than 10 years and wrote a prize-winning column for the paper. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Food and Drink.