Should the Phone Still Eat First?

A humble proposal to shoot your food like you and no one else cares (because they don't).

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Performative Man

Jeff Ayars heads video at Blackbird, produces independent films, and formerly field-produced stories for MSNBC and NBC News.

On a sweaty night last July, I went restaurant-hopping with wunderkind chef Marcin Król in anticipation of his pop-up collaboration with Blackbird. I had recently acquired the go-to camera of the performative male community, and was duty-bound to document every morsel that hit the table. Dishes were rotated, hands were frozen, chopsticks were balanced. I accepted my position as Vibe-Killer-In-Chief. Does that lemon have another squeeze left? Can the coup glass have more condensation? Strike the seafood tower — the ice looks like it’s from AMC.

For a little while, though, snapping such photos scratched my cinematic itch.

Then, suddenly, I was struck with an existential question: “why?” Why was I trying so hard? Don’t we all know that trying isn’t cool? Or, more to the point of this piece: does anyone really want to see, let alone believe, your perfectly orchestrated food porn that serves no greater purpose than a grating social media flex?

I happened to catch the precise retort to my question in 47.3 megapixels: Chef Król absentmindedly using his (outdated) iPhone to snap a single shot. Done. Back to eating. Dude was locked, in the zone, with no time for performative documentation.

If this article has made its way to you, I’d wager you’re likely responsible for a handful of the 1.5 trillion photos taken per year — an estimated 85 billion of which are of food. That’s over two-thousand photos every second.

Should we stop this madness? Yes! But of course we won’t. The only alternative is to photograph our food in a more nonchalant way. So, whether said photos wind up on your grid, in a magazine spread, or rotting in your digital waste bin, I humbly present the following suggestions as someone who lets food get cold for a living.

Pretty food, ugly flash
The low-hanging fruit. Use your iPhone or the early aughts point-and-shoot that you just overpaid for on eBay. This has already saturated faux-casual culture, so limit yourself to one shot. Nothing says try-hard like blinding your server.

“I’m good, but I’m busy.”
If you insist on retaining some artistic integrity, grab the frame just after the perfect frame. Yes, you can set your blocking, dial in your light, line it up — but then miss it and move on.

Or miss the dish entirely
“I’m so busy (and present and grateful) that I totally forgot.”

The work flex
You’re not bragging, you’re so busy and this is all room service had.

The high-low
“I can’t resist but I’m self-aware.”

The confessional
Raw. Shameful. A cacio e pepe is as hard to photograph as it is to eat, but you can hear the antacids rattling into my hand.

Pure cinema
No amount of preparation could have achieved this, my most memorable food moment of the last seven years. The sunset, the graffiti, the waste, the temptation. Why didn’t they finish it? Where did they go? Why wasn’t I invited? The photo below is the only version that I found. I didn’t bother to adjust my shadow or crouch for a closeup. The result? An effortless snap that my adversary, Monsieur Marcin, might have taken.

But back to my night with Marcin

Like all art—and, yes, in this case I am really stretching the definition to include our ‘phone eats first’ shots—sometimes it’s what we choose to leave out that tells as much as what we include. Case in point: my night out last summer. Gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you what I ate that night. But my best photo? Sure. It’s this slapdash shot of Chef Król stealing the last seat from me at Sip & Guzzle, which captures the vibe of that evening better than any perfectly-framed food photo could have. Sometimes nice guys finish last, and nice photos don’t do numbies. In the end, I didn’t get my nightcap, I certainly didn’t photograph it, and yet I slept like a baby.

My advice? Don’t try. But if you must, make sure nobody knows.