A Feast of Historic Food Photography

With the rise of foodie culture, not to mention the rise of social media, a certain strain of food photography has gone the way of cliché. That doesn’t stop us from ogling a nice, juicy cheeseburger or a hot-pink hibiscus doughnut every once in a while (or several times a day). But a new coffee-table compendium, “Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography,” harks back to a time when food was still a fresh subject. The book, with text by the British curator Susan Bright, is a skipping stone through photographic history of many genres—art, cookbook, advertising, journalism—showing food in all its glory, from the simplest egg to the most ornate bride’s cake. What’s more, as seen among the nearly two hundred photographs here, starting with a precisely staged still-life of fruit, by William Henry Fox Talbot, from the eighteen-forties, and continuing through the cheeky D.I.Y. food-journal pictures of the twenty-tens, food and the way it’s shown can be a potent indicator of—or affront to—culture, class, race, religion, and survival itself.