Ponder Inspiration from Carleton Watkins 2

Hampered by the limited size of his traditional camera, Watkins asked a cabinetmaker in 1861 to build a huge camera for him capable of making negatives measuring 18 by 22 inches, called mammoth plates. With this instrument, Watkins was able to capture the enormous scale of the vast landscapes of the American West as well as intricate details. He transported this large, heavy camera, with tripod, glass plates, and a portable darkroom, to the most forbidding spots, and consistently returned with images of superb technical quality.

In 1864 and 1865, Watkins was hired by the geologists Josiah Whitney and William Brewer to make photographs of Yosemite for their California State Geological Survey.

We wanted to capture the enormous scale and intricate detail of the vast landscape of the American adolescent diet.

Ponder Inspiration from Carleton Watkins 1

In an effort to expand the Ponder Food as Love landscapes of nurture into the real world, we began to think of the contemporary landscape of industrialized food production. We were inspired by the work of Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) who moved to California in 1851 and began his photographic work in 1854. 

One of the first to photograph the American West, Watkins' work celebrated the majestic landscapes of California:  the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Lake Tahoe, Big Trees, Virginia City, southern California, Arizona, the Pacific Northwest, Yellowstone, and San Francisco and the Bay Area. His images prompted the U.S. Congress to set aside large areas for national parks.

In 1863 Watkins visited the inaccessible northern California town of Mendocino to document its thriving lumber industry on behalf of its mill owners. Expressing a view held by many nineteenth-century Americans, Watkins depicted industry existing comfortably with nature.

Watkins' photographs were commissioned by corporate interest of the day; the Central Pacific Railroad, lumber and the milling industry and mining.  He documented landscapes ripe for commercial exploitation. We are interested in this use of photography and consider this approach when we address a current frontier of industrial exploitation, the bodies of our children. 

Ponder Editing

Many colleagues have generously given time and brainpower in an effort to help us edit and order this work. Any order for these landscapes of give and take and give and expectation will be very dependent on the format:  the size, the wall, the book or the portfolio.  Their relationship to new, different work about this subject will also effect their order...getting closer we think.

Legacy of Claes Oldenburg as Foodie

Why we love Claes Oldenburg: how he works.

"The key to my work is that it's about my experience," said Mr. Oldenburg, 83, in an interview in Vienna last month. "If I ate BLTs, which I did, I would sooner or later want to create them."

Oldenburg uses the phrase " transformation of my surroundings" and at that scale, he certainly does. A flat and relatively tiny photographs, are already a transformation. From that place we proceede to play with the reference to reality, question it and suggesting alternatives.

Oldenburg, Shoestring Potato Spilling from a Bag, 1966

The Industrial Landscape on T.V.

In 2007 the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation sponsored Food For Thought, a study of television food advertising to children in the United States.  "As policymakers, consumer advocates and health organizations have sought to address the increasing problem of childhood obesity in this country, one of the many potential variables they’ve focused on has been the abundance of food advertising seen by children, particularly on TV."

Four Artists - Inspiring Foodscapes

LIZ HICKOK  San Francisco in Jell-O series.

ALEX McLEOD  Well, McLeod does not use food, but inspiring none the less.

CARL WARNER Fairytale foodscapes  and otherscapes.

WILL COTTON, Paintings of cotton candy and more candy and chocolate.

Thinking About the Future and Past Food

Ingenious Stone Age Meat marketed by Bosch....we'd get their refrigerator. See the advertisement on YouTube.

Regarding the future of food, Next Nature tells the story 

"Every time we eat a piece of food, we take a bite out of the world. All these small bites tell a dozen stories. A carton of eggs presents the story of contented hens, a bottle of olive oil the tale of Italian grandmothers. Yet these pastoral scenes barely hide the realities of a food system that leaves one billion people starving and another billion overweight. Moving beyond food-based fictions, how should we react to the truth?"   They have suggested many answers to this question at their website: 

This Japanese Juice box is camouflaged from modern box designs and tries to convince consumers with its appealing ‘natural’ look. A schoolbook example of biomimicmarketing; marketing a product using images of old nature.

The Land of Beef - We Won't Be Going There

In our Industrial Landscape research we found some idyllic locations. We discovered "the power of protein in the land of lean beef." Powerful, maybe, but to our way of thinking, a bit too beautiful and seductive.



L's distinguished colleague at UWM, Nicholas Lampert, is more irreverent when he constructs his meatscape collages out of chicken and pork, as well as cow. We find his images poignant and sweet, making us yearn for our hormone-free childhood and our road trips through the America Southwest. Some images are out of this world....

Collect Dot Give Book

CollectdotGove   The Book

November 2011
The charity-based online photography gallery collect.give announces the release of a book celebrating the project's first 50 photographers – all of whom have pledged to donate 100% of their print proceeds to charities they've selected. We were thrilled to be a part of this project and honored by the essay written about Ponder Food as Love, by MAM Curator of Photography, Lisa Hostetler. 


A list of all of the participating photographers:

Industry Research - Transition to Savory Grains

As we make the transition from shooting sweet cereal to the savory grains, so does Kellogg's, which just bought Pringles, the second largest savory snack product in the world. This move will boost Kellogg's snack division to 40% of total sales. According to the Wall Street Journal, Kellogg Chief Executive John Bryant said the move isn't an indication that the Battle Creek, Mich., company is worried about the future of cereal. "We love the cereal business. It's a long-term growth business," he said in an interview. "This is an add for us—it's not running away from anything."

Here's our Ingredient List:

Industry Research - History of the Sweet Grains

No sooner had we gotten our cereal desert landscape film back from the lab, than I noticed a new book by Marty Gitlin and Topher Ellis, The Great American Cereal Book, a history of the industrialization and "funification" of one of America's earliest of health foods.  
The first manufactured breakfast cereal, Granula, was invented in l863. Coincidentally, Carleton Watkins, whose work inspired our first food desert landscape (2/6/2012 post - Visiting the Food Desert with Carleton Watkins) was selling stereoviews of Yosemite, the New Almaden mining region, the Mendocino coast as well as views of San Francisco by 1863.
The "fun-factor" in the package design accelerated thanks to 60's consumerism spurred by television advertising....an impressive array:

Americans love their breakfast cereal, which is second only to milk and soda in supermarket spending. Cereals and their cartoon spokescharacters are some of the most enduring pop-culture icons of the 20th century. The Great American Cereal Book is the definitive compendium of breakfast cereal history and lore, celebrating the most recognizable brands and packaging, such as Cheerios, Cocoa Puffs, Frosted Flakes, Grape-Nuts, and Trix. Award-winning writer Marty Gitlin and co-author Topher Ellis provide behind-the-scenes stories about the creation of these iconic kitchen-table companions, with 350 images of cereal boxes, vintage ads, and rare memorabilia. (synopsis from Abrams Books)

Ongoing Nurture - The Compost Bucket Defined

We began photographing our compost buckets because they were another facet of the emotional process of nurture...This excerpt from Three Quarks Daily article defines the microbial process... 

9/5/11 Gut Feeling

We’re exposed first to our mother’s microbial flora during birth; these are the pioneering settlers of our gastro-intestinal (GI) tract.  In the following weeks our gut becomes fully colonized with a diverse array of bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Although our gut microbes are generally about an order of magnitude smaller in size than human cells, when counted by the trillions, they add up. 

....diverse community of saprophytic organisms (etymologically derived from sapro = putrid, and phyte = plant) and of an accompanying host of small animals that feed directly upon the decay or that nibble on the saprophytic microbes involved in decomposition.  The outcome of all this caliginous toil is the liberation of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and elements otherwise trapped in the death’s charmless chambers.  The carbon burbles through the soil and back into the atmosphere, the nutrients spill into the soil and are scrambled over by microbes and plants all obeying life’s blind will to amplify. 

One should not be deceived by the daintiness of an intermittently protruding mushroom or toadstool.  These are merely wardrobe malfunctions in the great show of mouldering – unseemly exposed tips of a grand underground organism whose digestively capable filaments (called hyphae) can extend as a network over many miles… yes, miles.  Fungi, in fact, are celebrated among the world’s largest organisms.And this is the enigma of soil diversity therefore: so many animals live on the same diet with little specialization of feeding habits.  How can this be so? 

Animals feed upon microbes to get at get their carbon fix and in doing so take in more nitrogen that they can process.  To deal with this animals excrete that excess.  The bottom line: the piss of armies of small animals sustains this green earth.  Nitrogen gets into soils in other ways, of course, and soil critters perform other functions, but it is hard to overestimate the influence of tiny soil animals – mites and springtails (primitive wingless insect-like critters) – in orchestrating rot. 

We are all shuffling along the waiting line into the Kingdom of Decay. The workings of the upper five centimeters of the Earth’s surface may repay the considerable effort it takes to learn about it.  The payoff may be felt not only in contemplating our collective environmental future but in contemplating our personal demise.