Edible Landscapes: Miniature Vignettes Made from Food

What Martian landscapes have to do with London’s skyline and the mutations of Thanksgiving.

CARL WARNER FOOD LANDSCAPES

British photographer Carl Warner doesn’t look at broccoli and cabbage leaves the way you do. He seems in them trees and sunset skies. His fantasy food landscapes are part Ansel Adams, part Anthony Bourdaine, painstakingly hand-crafted with only minimal Photoshop involvement.

London Skyline

Riverbank walls: panini; lamppost: mackerel, asparagus, onion, vanilla pods; London Eye: green beans; courgette, leek, lemon, rhubarb supports; The Dome: green melon.

Coconut Haystacks

Parsley trees with horseradish trunks, red cabbage sky, toasted almonds as distant haystacks, and loaves of bread for hills

Chinese Junk

The roster of ingredients includes dried lotus leaves for snails, noodles for the wood floor, physalis lanterns, and the obscure wild green yamakurage for the rope.

Celery Rain Forest

Canope made of okra with dried chili oarsman, tiny mushroom hat and a cardamom pod; path: pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and lentils

Cart & Balloons

Balloons made of red onion, apple, garlic bulb and other fruits; balloon baskets: nuts; hills and fields: bread, cucumber, string beans, green beans, corn, asparagus

Warner’s book, Food Landscapes, came out last month and is a page-turner of visually delicious fascination.

via NPR

MATTHEW CARDEN SMALL WORLD

Almost two years ago, we spotlighted photographer Matthew Carden’s Small World — a series of stunning macro photographs exploring our relationship with food through a compelling blend of playfulness and meditation on wastefulness.

Lambs

Monks walking on a lettuce-and-bread mountain trail

Sprinkles

Take a ride down the sprinkles-covered hill

Carden’s work is a timely prompt for reflection around Thanksgiving, a holiday designed as appreciation for our blessings yet one that has mutated into a celebration of gluttony and excess.

MATTHEW ALBANESE STRANGE WORLDS

We featured Matthew Albanese’s Strange Worlds at length back in February, but his miniature condiment landscapes are worth a revisit. The remarkably detailed creations, made out of everyday culinary materials like cinnamon, paprika, jello and corn syrup, depict emotive visions of surreal, often otherworldly landscapes.

Tornado made of steel wool, cotton, ground parsley and moss

A Martian landscape, made out of 12 pounds paprika, cinnamon, nutmeg, chili powder and charcoal

See more of Albanese’s fantastic and fantastical work here.

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Baraka: A Breathtaking Journey to 24 Countries on 70mm Film

Baraka is a breathtaking journey through 24 countries across 6 continents, painstakingly shot on Todd AO-70mm film by filmmakers Ron Fricke and Mark Madgison. It has no plot, no actors and no script; instead, it unfolds a spellbinding collection of rich, high-quality images stitched together with compelling cinematography an original score by Michael Stearns.

The films I’m making are nonverbal, there’s no main characters in them. The main characters are locations and the essence that comes out of those images.” ~ Ron Fricke

The word baraka comes from the Sufi language of the Middle East and means, in the broadest possible terms, a blessing.

This is not a documentary or a travelogue, it’s really not. It’s really meant to be a moving emotional experience about life on the planet and each of our place here, and not about where is this or where is that.” ~ Ron Fricke

You can catch a full, though tragically low-quality, stream of the film on Google Video, but we highly recommend the fantstic 2-disc special edition, available on both DVD and Blu-ray, which — we don’t need to tell you — packs the right ratio of obscurity, originality and visual artistry to make a superb holiday gift for the film, photography or travel geek in your life.

via @panopticon76

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The Power of Photojournalism

What Kenyan tribes have to do with Ohio’s ghettos and the global water crisis.

These are turbulent times for photojournalism. At once declared dead, extolled as a creative business model and explored in new forms of media education, photojournalism has reached a cultural tipping point at a time of more international wars, civic unrest and natural disasters than in any other concentrated period of modern history. The Power of Photojournalism is a two-part documentary by the Annenberg Space for Photography investigating just what the title promises through the work of the 66th annual Picture of the Year International winners.

Photography is one of the most important parts of journalism because it reaches people so powerfully. It’s quicker, it’s more visceral than text. Photography is immediate.” ~ Geneva Overholser, Director, School of Journalism, USC Annenberg School for Communication

The bottom line is heart. And the one thing photojournalists have always had is heart.” ~ Rick Shaw, Director, Pictures of the Year International

You can see a full online gallery of the winners at the Annenberg Space for Photography. For a closer look at the role of photojournalism in framing culture and making sense of the world, we highly recommend Witness in Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers — a fascinating and visually gripping survey of the genre through interviews of and and images by 22 of the world’s most prominent photojournalists.

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