September 22, 2011

Electron Microscope Food Pictures


That's not an aerial landscape photo you see above. It's a picture of a fortune cookie taken with the help of an electron microscope. Caren Alpert specializes in photographing food and ready meals. From the artist's website:
What's in our food? What's the difference between a bird's-eye view of a remote vegetable crop and a microscopic swath from a pineapple leaf? How distinct is a pile of table salt from miles and miles of icebergs? Photographs taken with electron microscopes have seized my interest because of their mystery and simultaneous familiarity.

This medium deconstructs, abstracts, and reveals the ordinary in a riveting way. The closer the lens got, the more I saw food - and consumers of food - as part of a larger eco-system. There's so much rhetoric in our culture around food: food science, food journalism, food history, and food how-to. It is my hope that these photographs might transform our food obsession into a newfound closeness with what nourishes us.
Caren Alpert's website.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That fortune cookie looks really cool under a microscope. I want to see what other foods would look like now.