Scary Color-Steampunk Photos of Food, 1933

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1129

In the earliest part of the printed history of picturing scary things everything left the printer in black and white.  The colorist added the necessary tinting and fright stuff, though it seems to me that the sheets that made it through to binding in black and white were the most disturbing of them all. Most of the time and for several centuries color was left to the desire of the individual, the purchaser of the book; the green of dragons or the reds of monster men or yellows of serpents were mostly given life by the buyer.  Color printing had to wait more than three hundred years after Gutenberg’s Bible–there was some multi-color printing for grammars and the like where words and phrases were printed in multiple colors, requiring numerous passes through the press, but by and large the color printing of artwork was more a 19th century thing more than anything else.         
My own preference is for black and white images that let the mind fill in the beasts from outside in, allowing the imagination to run with the text and the description of the beast, rather than fast-forwarding to the completed images.  It is these images, the black and whites, which have retained some element of scary or creepy over the years; the colored images don’t make it quite so well. 
                                               
Color does makes some unexpected contributions to scariness, and in uncommon places.  For example, this photo from a 1933 Chicago World’s Fair pamphlet for the exhibitor Durkee Famous Foods fits the ticket perfectly.  It is an image of a sandwich loaf that is made mainly with scrapings of ham and lots of Durkee products, which were things like mayonnaise, oleomargarine, cheese squeezings, tapioca, coconut oil, salad dressings and vegetable shortening.  The color of the object only heightens the creepiness of its contents, all of which was topped by a layering of mayonnaise and cream cheese studded with olives.

Admittedly this color photograph comes at the earliest stages of the modern aspect of color photography, and perhaps the engineers were a little too anxious at spreading their food-color, it still just isn't good. Here’s the recipe: 

There's also this incredible plate (below), having some sort of internal color dialog with itself, though manifested externally--it must not be a pretty conversation.  House of La Rosa.  101 Ways to Prepare Macaroni seems about as benign and forgettable a title that one could write; that said, once opened, this little pamphlet poured its heart out to the Naïve Surreal in us all with the unforgettable (and accurate) color images of the promised linguine delicacies. 

And of course there are innumerable examples of architectural bits:

And even when beautiful, color can be scary, as in the case of the very highly problematic Oliver Byrne, whose work restructuring the explanation of the first six books of Euclid is inversely useful to its great beauty.

As unsettling as these color images may be, none come quite so close to being a truly visceral experience as does the Durkee sandwich loaf.  These other color examples are just simply wrong; but the Durkee food product, slathered in oil and leftover, is just so wrong it isn't even wrong anymore. 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Jeff Donlan]

Food pictures can be so disturbing. The sandwich load definitely elicits a visceral reaction. It made me think of a friend's travel blog from this winter/spring, when they traveled for months around SE Asia. His food pictures are great, and it's partly his skill as a photographer but also a result of digital photos on a computer screen. Assuming one's monitor is reasonably balanced, the photos are always fresh. Food photos in magazines and on menus quickly change. I have a certain feeling attached to Chinese food menus with faded, yellowed photos of dishes. It's almost enough to turn me away from a restaurant. On top of all that, though, the very idea of the Durkee sandwich loaf off-putting. And I love mayonnaise.

[John F. Ptak]

Truth be told Jeff I associate wound with the colors--and not pretty sound at that. On the other hand I can very well imagine the comfort that you could feel from this sort of meal, so long as that comfort was being enjoyed then, and not now.

I think that the colors used in LIFE magazine though actually get brighter with age. Redder reds and so on.'

YOur Chinese Menu Portrait forms an instant image and dislike--portraits of food like that look like the way it sounds when someone scratches their feet. For me it was the menus in the front window of a Mexican restaurant on 18th St DC that bothered me so--they had been there for years, and were almost entirely faded away. Still they stayed.

What's the deal with pictures of food in menus anyway? Nothing ever looks like the picture, so why bother? I'd like to start a simple project of photographing and comparing the food that comes in packages with their advertised pic with what slides out of the box or bag. I bought some veggie sausages recently that had a porn-y sorta pic on the packaging but the food product that tumbled out look like a turd. Isn't there some sort of non-market-law law in charge of that sort of thing?

I tell ya...