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FOOD PORN OR SEX PORN? "Using the world porn in connection with food photography desensitizes us to the pejorative meaning of the word, and thereby makes sex porn seem not really so bad." Alan
Madison, as quoted in Gastronomica, winter 2010.
This image is from the Barney's Spring 2010 catalogue. This catalogue featured numerous photos of women posing among food: cupcakes, potatoes, and pomegranates among other things. For the 2010 holiday season, Barneys continued the food trend with their catalogue titled "Have a Foodie Holiday." All of these ads seem like attempts by Barney's to access the cultural obsession with food (or with being a "foodie"), and the fascination with the new genre of "food porn." Thus, the narrative of pornography and the narrative of fetishized food commodities become are exploited to sell clothes, in this case Dolce & Gabbana lace. The demographic that shops at Barney's (a high end department store), probably overlaps significantly with the population that would identify as "foodies." Access to both of these lifestyles requires significant disposable income and time. In terms of the clothing in particular, the subject has very little agency in what to wear, or how to wear it; she is just a vehicle for advertising the dress. As Kath Weston contends in her essay "Do Clothes Make the Woman?" (1993), "clothing is more readily subject to individual manipulation (and thus more compatible with performance theory) than divisions of labor or activities, which must be socially negotiated" (Weston 1993:11). However, in this case, the model is not able to "manipulate" her own image, and thus the agentive powers are transferred to someone else (the designer, or photographer etc.). So while the image appears to be taken in her own home, the most easily controlled part of her is in fact out of her control. Despite this fact, the desired effect seems to be her portrayal as a home-keeper, and the revealing clothes that the subject is wearing corroborate this feeling that it is a private space. She does not acknowledge the viewer, and in fact, we can barely see any of her eyes. These decisions serve to construct a voyeuristic feeling- something consistent with the food porn/sex porn parallels. Several things in the image serve to create the aura of a classic domesticity. The milk bottle is a glass one, a style that evokes feelings of an earlier era. It does not really seem like she is drinking the milk, yet the bottle is not full either. Her two hands serve to frame the milk bottle and her breasts in a manner that leaves little room for doubt that the viewer is supposed to make a connection between breast milk (and therefore her essential "woman-hood"), and the bottled milk. There is no brand or label on the bottle, and no text in the picture except for the caption: "Dolce & Gabbana" with the price. Despite this construction of the subject as a domesticated woman, her actual position makes no practical sense. There is no glass to pour the milk into, it does not look like she has been drinking the milk at all, and I can make no reasonable connection between black lace and milk. The milk bottle further serves along a line to her mouth, where her lips are highlighted with red lipstick. Most of the composition is a study in grays, from the shadows to the dress to the milk itself, and thus her lips jump out by themselves. However, they are constructed as a pornographic component to this image by the placement of the milk bottle; her hand holds it pointing to her mouth, a foodie phallus for the domestic woman. |
