Out today on Clic.hé photography webmagazine a new reportage titled “Casual Eaters” on food and its relation to humans… as I see it.
All photos were taken using Instagram.
Here is the translation for the text I wrote for the Clic.hé page:
Food and the time we dedicate to its consumption represent the highest expression of human cohesion; as a matter of fact this begins in the family, where a meal is a traditionally aggregating moment whose social function we sometimes don’t seem too aware of.
There aren’t many cases where we like to eat a meal on our own, and seldom food is truly appreciated only when the in the company of others. This is especially true for us Italians.
I had the opportunity to think this over in a time when one after the other I lost all my usual meal companions - mostly colleagues but also friends - finally finding myself having lunches on my own.
I then found myself needing to fill such emptied social pauses and I turned them into moments where I was observing the rituals of unknown neighbors sitting at the tables next to mine, improvising them as my temporary fellows in the feeding ritual. Sometimes I was able to involve other friends or colleagues with whom new bonds of ritual sharing were born.
I shot some of these moments in a spontaneous way, using means that are themselves expressions of contemporary social interaction: my iPhone and the Instagram app.
Mostly I took candid shots and subjects were not aware of being pictured. Other times I involved my subjects explicitly, making them in different degrees unwitting accomplices of the thinking process that was behind the photo I was taking.
Food was always the comprimary in the act of consumption, on the same level with the people portrayed, who never appear in their entirety or as fully recognisable.
Finally, reviewing the pictures as a whole, it seemed to me as if I had been somehow recreating certain moments in the film “La grande bouffe” by Marco Ferreri (1973), even though I had nothing to share with the characters and the desperation portrayed in the film…
