Open Theme 1st place winner

We are what we eat. Food shapes and fuels our body, but it is so much more. This most basic act can signify a religion, a nation, a lifestyle. It’s connected to desires and fantasies, sex, travel, environment, politics. It has a strong evocative power and can bring us back to our grandmother kitchen within seconds. That’s might be why food it has always been such a popular subject in painting and then in photography. Photo-sharing on social-media did the rest and now photographing food has never been more popular.
With this project I tried to see beyond the food and I experimented with the shapes, colours and consistencies. I wanted to use the food as I use paint and brushes, to create new stories and situations in which the rules of reality don’t count.
First, I shot the pictures using myself as model and a white background. Then I printed the photos and I had lots of fun combining the food and the paint on the printed photo to create humorous, sometimes surreal images. Finally, I photographed the images again.

I spent most of my life shooting and painting. When I finally realized that I need both, and they don’t need to be separate works, it set me free.
I’m not interest in creating fantasy, abstract worlds, and I’m not interested in appearances and descriptions either, but what I need to make sense to, is the world around me and all its people. Both the environment and every living being in it are constantly changing and their most significant traits are invisible to the eye. So, I asked myself how could I use photography to talk about something invisible?
Paint is a wonderful medium that opens you to infinite possibilities, but this versatility was a limit to me as I need that deep connection to the world around me that photography brings.
Photography is deeply linked to what we see, to the physical reality. Many scholars have discussed this topic at length, much better than I could ever do. It may be ‘the death of reality’, a ‘hyperreality’ or a ‘minute part of reality’, in any case its profound connection to the world that physically exists it’s undeniable.
But when emotions are involved, and we look at reality as something