To Value the Breadth of Black Cuisine, You Have to Photograph It
We need to decolonize what is considered ‘aesthetically pleasing’ food
If you’re looking for Black or West African food on iStock, you might have some trouble. A search for “Black food” or “African American food” pulls up a range of random results: a few Black Americans cooking or eating, an image of coffee beans, and a graphic of a hamburger. Well-known dishes like shrimp and grits, cornbread, and collard greens fail to show up on the first page of options.
Contrast this with a search for “Italian” or “French” food, and the results are drastically different. Several thousand options are available for each cuisine, and the first page of both searches includes their respective dishes: pasta, pizza, and prosciutto for Italian, and for the French, endless options of cheese, soups, and quiches. These differences don’t just exist on iStock — major publications across the Western world highlight even less food photography of Black and West African food, perpetuating the very inequalities the food reporting industry has tried to overcome.
Food photography typically is, by nature, a privileged career of choice, impacting who is behind the camera in the first place.
