The 2023 edition of the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year competition rewarded photographer Jon Enoch and his shot The Candy Man, while 24 other sub-categories were awarded.
Food photography is a strange field for the uninitiated. Narrowly summed up in its decorative dimension, it forms, through the Pink Lady Food Photographer of The Year, a photographic genre in its own right, with social and cultural political dimensions extended to food practices and customs. A much broader vision than its somewhat narrow French dimension.
Culinary photography is an art form that enables us to capture the beauty and tastiness, if not the allure, of dishes and ingredients. But it is also, in its food dimension, or its aestheticizing aspect, a simple testimony to life. Jon Enoch’s work tells the story of the eating habits of millions of people on this planet, of street food snatched at the drop of a hat from a vendor pushing his hours in the half-light.
His portrait of the vendor, serious and with a certain hauteur, is as much a testimony as a subtle harmony of colors, made somewhat disconcerting by the bright, childlike pink of the cotton candy. Caroline Kenyon, founder of the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year competition, compares this photograph to paintings by Reynolds and Gainsborough, two great portraitists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a comparison that doesn’t seem outrageous.
A special mention might be made of the hopeful portrait by Burgundy photographer Thierry Gaudillère, winner of the “Errazuriz Wine Photographer of the Year” category. This woman holding a shovel, like the traveling salesman, carries the weight of work, the overwhelm of fatigue and the joy that comes with it. Frontal, this full-length portrait is rich in detail. As is the virtuosity of Zhonghua Yang’s Anchang Sugar Dance Artist, winner of the “Regional Award – China” and “The Phillip Harben Award for Food in Action” categories, which by far and away wins the personal, and entirely subjective, approval of yours truly.
Other photographs are disarmingly simple, and this economy of gesture underlines the simple beauty of the ordinary scenes immortalized. Such is the case with Felipe Pizano’s Dinner is ready, or with this child’s mouthful of sauce (Slurping Spagghetis by Catherine Falls), a scene that will inevitably bring back childhood memories.
The PLFPOTY encourages and highlights the work of student photographers and the very young, divided into three age categories (15-17, 11-15 and 10 and under), a way of showing that food, culinary taste, aesthetic tastes and photographic practice all come together.
Pink Lady® Food Photographer of the Year 2023
20 May – 11 June 2023
Free entry
RPS Gallery
337 Paintworks, Arno’s Vale
Bristol BS4 3AR
Royaume-Uni
