Painterly, Delicate Photographs of Everyday Foods

Maine-based mixed media artist Shoshannah White makes basic everyday ingredients look bold yet beautiful and delicate. With this series, White chose domestic food items that have been stocking pantries for years to explore how these items sweeten, preserve, and decay. White uses encaustic over photographs, shooting the images with an analog film camera, scanning, retouching and digitally printing the images before painting over them with a hot, molten wax to create a soft and ghostly, glowing effect. The wax is translucent and somewhat reflective, so the work changes as you shift your viewing angle, hiding and revealing different areas of the photographic image.

Brooklyn-based writer Sarah Goodyear wrote a poem, Recipe, to accompany White’s work:

If you would keep your beloved, you must feed her.
Sugar, yes, that melts on the tongue and leaves desire behind.
The flesh of every fruit that grows.
Soft slices of cheese with rind that blooms in the dark.
And salt, of course. Salt.
Which flavors all, and holds back the decay that still one day must come.
If you would keep your beloved, feed her thus.

This post was contributed by photographer Helen Grace Ventura Thompson.

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