- Written by: Mona Biedrzycka
John Berger spoke of a “crowding of images.” He never witnessed the scale we now inhabit: millions of food photographs pouring through screens each hour, most detached from any real moment, place or decision. Whether produced through templates, content factories or automated systems, the results follow the same logic: volume over meaning, speed over judgement, interchangeability over experience.
The consequence is not aesthetic fatigue; it is the erosion of memory. Roland Barthes described photography as “the evidence of what has been.” When a picture loses its tie to what actually happened - to the room, the heat, the craft, the person - it becomes decoration instead of evidence. A dish becomes a motif, a chef becomes a persona, a restaurant becomes a backdrop. What should have been documented becomes mood. What should have been remembered becomes noise.
Gastronomy lives through labour - the motions repeated until they settle into muscle, the risks absorbed during service, the fatigue that accumulates across seasons, the dexterity passed from one generation of cooks to the next. A dish reaches the pass only after a chain of decisions: sourcing, trimming, seasoning, timing, and plating. Most of which disappears the moment the plate lands in front of a guest. The front of the restaurant, too, is a daily construction of staff shaping the atmosphere with a plethora of tiny gestures that guests absorb instinctively but rarely name. When imagery compresses all of this into a single polished frame, stripped of effort and contingency, the labour that sustains the place is edited out of the story.
To defend real photography, we must acknowledge its full range. In gastronomy, it spans many genres: portraiture, still life, interiors, service, landscapes, producers, plates, gestures, tools, the small and the enormous. The way of paying attention. What separates authored photography from mass imagery is the fact that someone was truly there, looking.
Some photographers practise this over long arcs of time. They return to the same chefs, restaurants and environments, building a visual memory of their evolution rather than a sequence of isolated moments. Photographer P-A Jørgensen has documented many of the now-famous chefs, from Christian Puglisi since the beginning of Relæ, Magnus Nilsen at Faviken, to the Roca brothers at El Celler de Can Roca, Massimo Bottura, Marco Pierre White, you name it. The rooms change, the ideas mature, the chef shifts in stance and energy, yet the continuity of the gaze remains. Those photographs do not simply show different concepts; they reveal a working life as it develops. That depth is possible only with repeated presence.
Others approach gastronomy through the environments that shape it. Lido Vannucchi’s long-standing portraits of Italian chefs and restaurants combine people, plates and places in ways that make territory legible. His images tie food to context - not in the romanticised sense of “terroir,” but in the concrete sense of where things happen. He shows how a chef’s work sits inside weather, land, light, design and habit.
Photography can also act as a historical document rather than a stylistic one. John Carey’s Chefs in Lockdown captured more than 180 chefs during the closures, recording the emotional and economic rupture of that period. His portraits show dining rooms emptied of sound, kitchens stripped of rhythm, chefs caught between exhaustion and resolve. Those images testify to what the industry went through - not what it tried to present. They make a chapter undeniably real.
Together, these examples clarify what theorists like Sontag, Berger, Barthes, and Flusser were circling around: photography collapses when it becomes purely mechanical. What survives is what requires judgment. And judgment demands being there.
The presence in a kitchen is not romantic; it is structural. A photographer who stands in the room sees the hierarchy of stations, the choreography around heat, the instinctive exchanges between cooks, the tension at the pass, the calm that settles after the final table. These observations shape how the camera is used: where it stands, how close it gets, what it waits for, what it leaves out. Without that sensitivity, the photograph may be beautiful, but it is rootless. It shows food without showing work.
This collapse of meaning is not limited to photography. Writing has suffered the same erosion. The shift toward template-driven, SEO-engineered text has drained specificity and depth from restaurant coverage. Descriptions blur, language repeats, stories sound interchangeable. The slip from understanding to summarising is the literary equivalent of shooting for content rather than for memory.
The stakes are high because the industry has drifted into a belief that visibility equals relevance. The formula is familiar: launch with a striking interior, engineer a few photogenic dishes, activate the right influencers, and let the algorithm do the rest. For a moment, it works. What looks like success is often only acceleration. A restaurant becomes known before it becomes understood.
The problem is not attention itself - restaurants depend on it - but the way attention is constructed. Concepts designed for instant recognition rarely have the substance to hold local loyalty or to persuade travellers to choose them over hundreds of alternatives. They burn quickly because they begin at the surface: a motif, a mood, a hook. Once the novelty passes, there is no deeper connection to fall back on. Guests who arrived for the noise rarely return for the experience.
Depth, in contrast, is slow to build but resistant to collapse. It emerges from the coherence between what is cooked, who cooks it, where it happens and why it exists at all. When those elements align, people recognise a place with character, not just momentum. Local diners commit to it. Travellers seek it out instead of scrolling past it. Journalists can describe it without borrowing the language they use for everything else.
This is where photography becomes structural. Not because images make a restaurant survive, but because they help people understand what the restaurant actually is. Good photography clarifies intention. It shows the scale of work behind the scenes. It captures the atmosphere that text cannot hold. It gives local guests a reason to rediscover a place they thought they knew and gives visitors a reason to believe the journey is worth it. It anchors identity in a way that marketing cannot replicate.
When images carry authorship, they reinforce what is already strong in the restaurant itself. When they do not - when they rely on trend, template or borrowed polish - they weaken the link between what a restaurant claims to be and what guests experience. That gap is where hype dies.
Real photography, then, is not sentimentality. It is a strategy. It helps chefs be understood, not just noticed. It gives restaurants a visual vocabulary that endures beyond a cycle of trends. It provides journalists with material that reveals context rather than repeating clichés. It gives diners - local or visiting - a sense that a place has identity, coherence and purpose. It preserves the cultural record of gastronomy in a moment when so much else is built to evaporate.
This is the real cost of not looking. When the industry stops investing in authorship, it becomes disposable — and disposability is the most expensive business model of all.
