I take a digital photo about every food and drink i consume. Let it be a christmas-turkey or just one piece of rice or candy. No exception. Since 2006. Till the end of my Life. I do this for all the people on Earth, who cannot do the same, because of the lack of camera, or the lack of food (generally both of them). This action is one of the ways i express my gratitude towards Life, and everything that given to me.
I respect my daily food – thus my daily Life – so much. Food equals Life, we can say, so it’s a strong metaphore for everything what can be derived from Life itself. Life is almost everything. The only exception is maybe Death. But we can argue about that. Death is strongly connects to life, anyway..;)
Life is Happiness, Sadness, Beauty, Fear, Friends, Love, Family, Thoughts, Nature, Dreams, Time, Ideas,..
This whole project is about Gratitude. I “say” thank you for my daily food, before every eating. Some people do this via preying, or in so many other ways. I do it through photos. I don’t treat my behaviour as a religion, nor food fetishism. I just feel, what i do is good by nature. If you do a form of thanksgiving on a daily basis, you would feel that there are more and more things around, which you should / can be thankful for. Your life simply becomes richer by this recognition.
Praying before eating is the same as photographing before eating - according to the philosophy of iwanwilaga
Processing the photographed food: At the end of the day (erm, at the beginning of the next day) i upload the pictures to my PC from the camera, open photoshop and cut all the food around and drag all of them on a 3000 x 3000 pixels sized white canvas. This canvas = an empty image with white background. I call this “Daily Food Square“. Straight after i have cut out all the food, and placed onto the food-square, i have to scale them (until i get the real size proportions compared to each other.) After it i have to set the colors, darkness-brightness, saturation and shadow/lighting parameters of the food manually piece by piece. It takes approx. 40 min – 1 hour per day, but i never mind it. For more details, and how-to check “The Procedure” page.
I gladly do this preparatory to every meal of mine, and i only forget it once or twice a year. But i never forget about how lucky i am, cause i’ve born to a relatively wealthy spot on the Earth, where daily life is not about struggling and fighting for some basic food and water.
If i happen to forget to shoot a photograph about a meal (once or twice in a year) i have to draw it or note it down somehow. Why i do this at all ?! – you ask.
Taking it all round, food takes away about 1 hour from me every day! BUT.. on the other way it gives me energy for the remaining 23 hours. Not a bad deal isn’t it? Have you ever thought about that? Hm, I’m afraid, i respect food..
If we wouldn’t get food, we wouldn’t get any hours out of the 24 per day, anymore. So thus we can say, we are quite rich of valuable time and energy. We decide how we use them up. An average lifetime is long enough to use all our energy and time for really valuable things and moments. We are costly “machines”, we eat about 30 tons of food through a lifetime. Well, maybe i will be able to show a spectacular part of that. All the food i ate since 2006 (age 20) in one huge picture..
check this out! %)
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