I found Klaus Pichler work after experimenting and researching artists that also use or explore food within their work. In this case the work was really fascinating with a fairly similar concept to my own work as Pichler photographs moulding and decomposing food. His process was also really interesting to me as he turned his studio bathroom into a collection of food items and then documented them beginning to rot. His goal was to highlight the amount of perfectly good food that ends up going to waste worldwide. One third of all food produced for human consumption goes to waste, which is an equally disgusting and shocking fact.
The reason this work was so important and inspiring to me and my own work is the way he presents his work. The mix of still beauty, with the clear rot which logically should look disgusting but instead creates the most beautiful colours and shapes which over all add to an intense and striking result. With the purposefully centred composition and the black or darkened background, Pichler insures that all the focus is on the fruit. This intense focus is really enticing and for me is what makes it such an effective collection. This focus, and pleasing symmetry is something I want to try and encorparte into my own work. I feel my own work lacks refinement in its composition and I didn’t recognise that until I started looking at Pichlers work and realised the beauty in simplicity. This aesthetic is somehting purposeful that Klaus Pichler comments on when talking about his work:
“From the beginning, it was obvious for me that I wanted to quote the aesthetics of advertising photography, because I thought there is a little bit of a twist if I really style the food and make it look perfect. On first sight you react with ‘ok that looks nice,’ and then you realize what you are looking at.”-Pichler on the food collection in Natuonal Geographic.
I really love this idea of styling rotten food to appear enticing and seductive. Moving forward Im going to experiment within my own work to create photographs or art that is appealing even if in reality the subject matter is the complete opposite.
