Breakfast, Lunch, Tea: The Many Little Meals of Rose Bakery, by Rose Carrarini. Photographs by Toby Glanville. Published by Phaidon.
I’ve been wanting to do a post about Breakfast, Lunch, Tea for some time, even more so following some of the discussions that arose around literary and unliterary photography a few weeks ago.
Breakfast, Lunch, Tea is one of my favorite photobooks. I would say it was my favorite cookbook, but that would be slightly misleading, since I’ve never cooked from it. (When I cook, I tend to either stick to things I know, wing it, or ask someone.)
What engages my interest are Toby Glanville’s photographs. A lot of cookbook photography transforms food into glossy, sterile product, disconnected from its messy origins and uses. Glanville’s photographs do not do this. They represent the life cycle of Rose Bakery’s dishes, from products and suppliers to food preparation to the bakery’s counters and cases to patron’s plates. There are even representations of waste, which I think is somewhat unusual in this context — a flat of eggshells, a used teabag and dirty dishes, etc. — presented as representations of the meals they are remnants of.
The photographs are documentary in style. There is comparatively little in them which feels posed and arranged, and what does feel posed and arranged still seems very much in place and in the moment. The compositions feel simultaneously studied and offhand — a combination that fits well with the image of the bakery presented in the text. (This also cannot have been easy, considering the often cramped and visually hectic spaces in which Glanville was working.) From a strictly photographic standpoint, the approach almost always works in Breakfast, Lunch, Tea, although a few of the images have an off-kilter feel.
Of course, the photographs still (and necessarily) present an idealized image. I grew up around restaurants, and there’s quite a lot of seriously unromantic reality that goes into any establishment’s ability to routinely feed a large number of patrons. But this is a cookbook; conveying the unromantic aspects is not within its remit. So, the documentary style of Glanville’s photographs should be read as style; they are not documents. (This is not to say they may not be perfectly true depictions of Rose Bakery, of course.)
Because of this, it is better to resist the temptation to characterize these photographs as more real than the average food photograph. Not because they aren’t more real (I think they are), but because reality isn’t their purpose. What makes them better than food-as-product photos is that they appeal to the reader’s ability to understand context and to build a deeper appreciation based on context.
(Note: please pardon the low quality of my P&S photographs of the book. Rest assured that in real life, Glanville’s photographs as reproduced in the book are acceptably sharp, as is the text. I intend to figure out a better book-photographing or book-scanning system for future posts, but after the months-long adventure that was Ruinpornomicon, I have lost my taste for putting off posts.)
