Untitled, from the series Forbidden Pleasures, 1994

In the late 1970s, the George Eastman Museum asked a group of photographers for their favorite recipes and food-related photographs to go with them, in pursuit of publishing a cookbook. Playing off George Eastman’s famous recipe for lemon meringue pie and former director Beaumont Newhall’s love of food, the cookbook grew from the idea that talent in the darkroom must also translate to the kitchen. Published now, nearly forty years later, The Photographer’s Cookbook is a time capsule of the 1970s and includes recipes and photographs from Robert Adams, Richard Avedon, Imogen Cunningham, William Eggleston, among others. In this spirit, Aperture commissioned contemporary photographers to submit a recipe and food-related picture. The resulting works reveal a fascinating look at how today’s photographers depict food, home, and ritual, raising questions about consumption, desire, pleasure, and, in the broadest sense, taste itself.

Pigment Print
Image Size: 14 x 17 inches
Paper Size: 17 x 22 inches
Edition of 3 + 2 AP
Signed and numbered by the artist

Jo Ann Callis (b. 1940, Cincinnati, Ohio) began teaching at the California Institute of the Arts in 1975, while she was still studying for her MFA at UCLA. Her work has been widely exhibited in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art, all in Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Gallery Min, Tokyo. In 2009, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, presented a retrospective of her work, Woman Twirling. Callis has received three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other awards and prizes.