Most of us think surprisingly little about something as essential as food. Even for conscious consumers, the daily necessity of eating creates a tendency to interact with food mainly through habit and ritual. But viewed from unfamiliar angles, mundane foodstuffs can look provocative. This year The Festival of Political Photography focuses on food. Multiple exhibits around Helsinki recontextualize food production, distribution, and consumption, highlighting the politics, ethics, and humanitarian issues embedded in something everyone needs and most of us consume daily. The festival runs through May with exhibitions at the Finnish Museum of Photography, Virka, and Stoa.
Like most kids, I was taught not to waste my food, and like most urban adults I rely on supermarkets and restaurants to feed myself. Despite good upbringing and good intent, I am (and likely you are) implicated in a massive amount of waste before food even makes it to the plate.
The exhibitions at Virka focus on the wastefulness built into the food distribution systems of western countries. The show features several videos alongside still images. I gravitated towards Polish artist to kosie’s looped videos. Recorded with a hidden lapel cam while she worked as a waitress at a hotel breakfast buffet, the first video shows to kosie scraping plate after plate of food into the trash. Fruit salad, beans, toast, eggs, sausage, and porridge appear temptingly tasty as they tumble into the bin.
Dumpster Bagels
Her second video captures a dumpster diving session behind a supermarket. The camera angle, head height and overlooking a pair of hands, invites you into the scenario. I quickly found myself visually sorting the tossed buns, packaged bread, bruised fruit, and assorted vegetables, mentally filling up a shopping bag as the hands deftly made their own selection. Some of the food, especially the packaged items, is clearly still edible, appetizing even. Other items had been visibly spoiled only by the act of throwing them into a dirty bin.
To kosie’s videos are a distressing visualization of the dry statistics a quick google search spits out. Up to 40% of food on US supermarket shelves winds up in the trash. Through the whole farm to tummy process, one portion of food is lost or trashed for every portion that ends up on the table. Numbers vary between the United Nations, Business Insider, and Wired, but the estimates are all distressingly large.
Less immediately captivating if visually engaging in its own way is Filippo Zambon’s “Into the Bin,” images of trashed food framed by the neat square created by looking straight down a lined trash can. The colorful food tumbling abundantly over the folds of black plastic recalls Renaissance still life. The very state of being trashed imbues the food with aesthetic value, inviting the viewer to pluck the lovely yellow curve of an apple from a twining bed of leek greens. The images are pleasant to view but upsetting when aesthetic appreciation leads to consideration of what is wasted.
Many of the images at the Finnish Museum of Photography are difficult to look at, visually aggressive and distressing. The exhibit focuses on methods of food production and distribution. The easiest photographs to view are from Tim Franco’s “Metamorpolis” series. Surreal in composition, the photos depict tiny farmers working in patchwork fields beneath towering skyscrapers. Franco captured these images of abrupt rural to urban transition in the Chinese countryside where rapid urbanization creates strange juxtapositions of steel and greenery, glass and dirt.
Tucked behind dividers that allow visitors to choose whether they will view the photos are images of factory farming and another series showing the human consequence of farming Monsanto soja using glyphosate herbicide in Argentina. These are shot in a photo journalistic style that highlights subject matter over aesthetic. Indeed, viewing bodies twisted and broken by exposure to high levels of herbicide as aesthetic would be a bit suspect. Yet there is something compelling in the stark black and white textures.
While some of the works can be painful, others have strange beauty. I highly recommend a visit to at least one of the exhibits. It’s easy to habitualize and ritualize something as essential as food. Stopping for a moment to view it from another angle, to think, can make the mundane surprisingly enlightening.
