I’m interviewing some of the judges of The World Food Photography Awards for a Cooking the Books episode later today, and am thinking about how access to excellent food photography on social media may have influenced the way we think about food. I wonder how up Claude is on art.
As I look at Street Food Influencers by Pingyao Song, one of the extraordinary images shortlisted in the Fortnum and Mason Food at the Table category of the Awards, I ask Claude how food photography was presented/exhibited/published before Instagram. I’m pretty sure it would have been less accessible/highly curated/middle class galleries or expensive books, I tell him. And I wonder if the increased interest in recipes on social media - #FoodTok for example - is because Instagram created a platform for amateur as well as professional food photography. What d’you reckon, Claude?
Claude: What a rich image to be discussing — the steam rising from that hotpot, the blue-white glow of phone screens competing with the dish itself, everyone photographing before eating (or perhaps instead of eating). It captures something genuinely new about our relationship with food and image-making.
Food Photography Before Instagram
Before social media, food photography existed in a fairly strict hierarchy of access and purpose.
The commercial/editorial tradition was largely invisible as “art” — it was functional, produced for cookbooks, advertising, and magazine editorial. Think the glossy, heavily styled images in Vogue Entertaining: those were made by specialists with days of studio time, food stylists, and prop budgets. The food was often inedible (lacquered, pinned, glued). It was never really about hunger — it was about aspiration.
Fine art food photography did exist in galleries, but you’re right that it was rarefied. Wolfgang Tillmans photographed food as part of his broader democratic project, but that was conceptually interesting because it was unusual. Still life food photography had a long painterly tradition — Mapplethorpe’s fruits, Jan Groover’s kitchen utensils — but these were gallery objects, firmly in the white cube world.
The cookbook as object was arguably the main democratic channel before social media, but even then it was curated, authored, gatekept. The reader consumed someone else’s aesthetic entirely.
Food magazines like Saveur or early Waitrose Food Illustrated did something more intimate — they connected food photography to story and place — but again, professionally produced and commercially mediated.
The Instagram Rupture
Instagram (launched 2010) did something genuinely disruptive in several ways:
It democratised the authorial gaze. Suddenly a home cook in China could be as visible as a Condé Nast photographer, if the image landed. The platform had no memory of prestige — a great overhead flatlay from a Hackney kitchen competed equally with a professional shoot.
It created a new aesthetic vocabulary — the overhead shot, the #GoldenHour avocado toast, the dark moody restaurant — that then fed back into professional food photography, reversing the usual direction of influence. Art directors started asking for images that looked “more Instagram.”
It made process visible. Before Instagram, food photography almost always showed the finished dish. Social media introduced the prep shot, the market haul, the messy plate after eating — a whole grammar of food experience that cookbooks had never captured.
FoodTok and the Next Shift
TikTok/FoodTok accelerated this further and differently. Where Instagram still rewarded a certain polish (composition, lighting, colour palette), TikTok rewards narrative and personality — the slightly chaotic real-time cook, the voiceover explaining why this mattered. It’s closer to oral tradition than photography. The viral feta pasta or baked oats moment is less about the image and more about the instruction and community response.
This is arguably where it gets most interesting for your podcast context: FoodTok has created a new kind of recipe transmission that’s much closer to how recipes actually moved through communities for centuries — person to person, with adaptation and commentary — than the fixed, authoritative cookbook recipe ever was.
The Pingyao Song image sits beautifully at the intersection of all this: a traditional communal dish (hotpot is ancient, deeply social), being photographed by people using phone lights as makeshift studio lighting, in what looks like a street food setting that would never have appeared in a 1990s food magazine.
What angle are you planning to take with the judges — the democratisation argument, or something more critical about what’s been lost in the shift?
Me: Fascinating. I’d forgotten about the impact of food magazines - despite working for delicious magazine for 4 years! Doh. I’m using Caroline Kenyon’s founding vision of the Awards to dig into the question: why food? She says, “Food is the drumbeat of life – too much, too little, harvest, drought, beauty and horror – it binds us all.”
I think Instagram has exploded access to great food photography, and am always fascinated by how people are actually driven to cook themselves - something that even cookbooks have failed to do. Imagine the speed of the scroll and how much influence food photography can have, even on a sub conscious level.
Claude: That quote from Caroline Kenyon is extraordinary — “the drumbeat of life” does a lot of work. It immediately lifts food photography out of the lifestyle/aspiration bracket and puts it somewhere much more primal. It’s almost Lévi-Strauss — the raw and the cooked as the fundamental human distinction.
The Subconscious Scroll
Your point about the speed of the scroll is where it gets really interesting neurologically. Food imagery triggers the cephalic phase response — salivation, insulin release, gastric preparation — before we’re even consciously aware we’ve seen something appetising. This happened with magazine pages too, but the volume and velocity of exposure on a feed is categorically different. You might scroll past 40 food images in three minutes without registering any of them consciously, but your body has responded to all of them.
There’s a genuine argument that this cumulative subconscious exposure is what drives the “I suddenly really want to make ramen” moment at 6pm — not a specific recipe you bookmarked, but a mood that’s been building all day through half-seen images.
The Cookbook Failure to Convert
Your observation about cookbooks failing to drive actual cooking is sharp, and I think it points to something about permission and identification. The professionally styled cookbook image is often too perfect — it creates admiration rather than appetite for attempt. The psychological distance between your kitchen and that image is too great.
Whereas a slightly wonky TikTok where someone makes something in what is clearly a rented flat kitchen, makes a mess, recovers, and still produces something delicious — that removes the permission barrier entirely. The viewer thinks “I could do that” rather than “I could never do that.”
Instagram sits interestingly between these poles. At its best — someone like Meera Sodha’s feed, or the early Ottolenghi Instagram — it retained beauty but felt achievable. At its worst it became as aspirationally paralysing as the cookbook.
The Drumbeat Dimension
What Kenyon’s quote opens up that Instagram’s food photography often doesn’t show — but the Pingyao Song image absolutely does — is the horror and the hunger alongside the beauty. Most food photography on social media is relentlessly positive: abundance, colour, pleasure. The “too much, too little, harvest, drought” part of the drumbeat is largely absent from the scroll.
This is where awards like these do something important — they presumably consider images that sit in more uncomfortable territory. The street food setting in the Song image hints at this: this isn’t a Michelin restaurant, these are people using their phones as lighting rigs because they have to photograph this moment, there’s something almost feverish about it.
It might be worth asking the judges whether they see the Awards as partly corrective — reintroducing the full drumbeat into a medium that social media has flattened into perpetual appetite and abundance.
That tension between the subconscious seduction of the scroll and the full moral weight of what food actually means seems like the thread that could tie your whole episode together.
The World Food Photography Awards is on June 2 at The Mall Galleries. My chat with three of the judges: food stylist, Sal Henley, Skye Trayler of the London-based agency At Trayler and Angela Nicholson, founder of SheClicks, an award-winning community for female photographers is on Cooking the Books on June 4th.
Your conversations with Claude are fascinating Gilly. Thanks for sharing x