Writes Brady Brickner-Wood, in "The Unique Horrors of A.I. Food Slop/Why does it feel so unsettling when restaurants use generative A.I. to create their menus and promotional materials?" in The New Yorker.
No 19th century photographs at that link, so I found 2 for you: "The First of September" (1855)(showing 2 dead game birds hanging from a nail) and William Louis Henry Skeen, "Still Life of Exotic Fruits & Lizard from Ceylon" (c. 1880)(with, of course, lizards crawling over fruit).
Those 2 old photographs are not as exciting as I'd leapt to imagine they were. I should have noticed the promise of dreariness in those words "ethnographic art" and "restrained realism."
My imagination was fueled with images of old still-life paintings like this:
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16 comments:
1625 painting. Amazing colors.
My guess, without reading the article, is that we find AI images of food unsetteling for the same reason we find bad AI images of humans unsetteling, the uncanny valley.
For my sins, I worked many years at a large food company. One of my workmates was a food stylist, whose job was to tart up food for the camera. Marshall McLuhan supposedly said that color photography has done more for food than eating has.
As for the painting, people in the 1600s had not been conditioned to think that meat comes neatly butchered and packaged from the supermarket.
Well...the industrial revolution + capitalism increased our ability to produce things, including food. So...more food was becoming available to more people than ever before. And over time, food imagery went from a painting of something only the very wealthy could conceive of, to something many families had, and more families would desire.
The imagery of how food was and is depicted reflects the current society at large.
Years ago when I was in the restaurant biz, we would hire photographers with specific backgrounds in shooting food, to create images for our restaurant ads. Or when we were reviewed, the newspaper would send over their food photographer to take the accompanying shot. Often they'd have a spray bottle of glycerin to spray over the plate of food, to give it that shiny 'alive' look. It did take a certain skill in lighting and texture to be a good food photographer.
Now with ai, food photographers will still be used, but they are not necessary. You can do it yourself. Photographers will need to do more creative things with food to get attention. Yikes.
Isn't there a Scottish dish that involves hanging up the game birds until they rot?
I’ve always assumed it was a practical decision of early photographers- capturing what was on the other end of the table. Exposures were long and short focals so no sports photography or even portraits….and nobody had discovered infinite focal lengths so no landscape photography yet
So now someone has a juicy thesis on lizards in art. There's probably a connection to imperialism. Italians, though, had their own lizards in the South, and that may account for lizard paintings by Leonardo and Caravaggio. Lizard art goes nuclear in 1950s Japan.
In 10 years (or 10 months or 10 weeks) you won't be able to tell AI pictures from "real" ones, so get those indignant articles in now while you still can.
1800's Donald Duck
The Kimbell Art museum opens a 200 year exhibition from French collection.... https://kimbellart.org/event/members-only-previews-13?date=2026-10-02T12:00:00
Good photography has always been notoriously difficult, and by good I mean professional, high-quality photography (i.e. expensive). Critical lighting and tricks of the trade were needed. Anybody can take a picture of food, but how many times have you looked at your picture and thought, "it looks much better in person?"
AI is an inexpensive tool that restauranteurs can now use in an attempt to replicate that difficult to capture character and feel of old school photography. And like any tool, it's only as good as the craftsman using it.
*Good food photography...
"My guess, without reading the article, is that we find AI images of food unsetteling for the same reason we find bad AI images of humans unsetteling, the uncanny valley."
Oddly, the article never mentions the "uncanny valley" effect.
"Anybody can take a picture of food, but how many times have you looked at your picture and thought, "it looks much better in person?""
Friends and family on Facebook are always putting up photos of their food and I get the feeling they imagine us thinking "Wow, luck you, looks yummy, I'm jealous," but it's just a dreary blob.
I absolutely loathe influencer videos where they make a show of inserting something in their mouth and groaning with pleasure.
When I was kid, my Dad would bring home pheasant and rabbits shot just outside my grandmothers home in the woods. The women folk would clean them before cooking, and always thought that was way too much work when you could just buy food down the road. I had a gun since I was 12 years old and was free to go walking the woods with it anytime I wanted unsupervised, which was a wonderful childhood, but I was a lousy hunter, because although I would get excited about hunting and shooting things, I always regretted killing after it was done. Because of this, in my few years of deer hunting, I never shot one.
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