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Call them readymades: plastic food replicas (manufactured for food photographers?) out of which Volker Renner has assembled a visual ode to German cuisine that may well ruin your appetite. The eggs, now hardboiled, now sunny side up; the veal sausages with ketchup on cardboard plates; the meat loaf: they’re not just made of the same material, they’re also all fakes. Nothing about them is genuine, as Renner highlights in pairs of pictures showing them in the original packaging, then unwrapped. Picking up on two trends on social networks, F for Food combines the urge to capture even the most trivial meal with the protagonists’ dressing and undressing for no discernible reason for an irresistible concoction: you are what you eat, or vice versa. The clean and cool shots in the book—sold, appropriately, in its own plastic wrapper—recall pictograms or fast-food joint menu boards. Their anonymous look also raises the question of the artist’s authorship, an issue Orson Welles probed in his last documentary film, whose title inspired Renner: “F for Fake.” It’s a dizzying prospect: Might Renner’s authorship be a forgery, too?
Published by Volker Renner and Textem Verlag
Softcover
170 x 240 mm
ISBN 9783864851698
