The human body is quite possibly the most represented subject of artistic expression. And food photography a is hot commodity, as we see from the proliferation of images that flood the web today. Now the two have been married in a new book. I recently got a sneak peek at this unique book and had the opportunity to speak with Tiberio and Matt about La Figa. It is a playful book, full of recipes for food, love and life. It was very easy in the beginning since we used actual models, but we soon discovered that it was important to us to show a variety of body types.
Fruits and vegetables are different shapes and sizes, and so are people — a wide range of ages, shapes, and colors are represented in the book.
Of course, now that the book is coming out and people see what we have done, they are lining up to model for us! In addition, each shoot was very time intensive, after finding the right model and food, testing each particular body to food sensitivities and then creating the look, a shoot could take anywhere from two to six hours to find the perfect pose. We were looking for that one shot. Matt and I sometimes did not agree — but we learned to compromise. What has been the reception to this new concept among those that you have shown it to?
Though women seem to be more comfortable with it than men. We are too taboo about nudity. The most beautiful thing that I have seen is people sharing the book with their kids. I do hope that we will see more of this. We need to start to show nudity in this county. It is just the human body without clothes. I would fine tune the lighting and we would shoot from every possible angle and get every pose we could.
Eventually we would find it. But another one of our big challenges was using fresh food. The body is organic and we chose to use fresh ingredients that are also organic — fruits and vegetables mostly, and the body would just suck out all the juices so that the food would dry out.
