Bread lends itself to this project as there is a wide range of products available, from mass produced to hand made and artisan. The process and cost is highly variable for each loaf and I wondered if this would be evident when photographed. The language used in advertising and marketing is also highly evocative and has potential to be used as accompanying text or captions.

For this first experiment, I took some photographs of individual slices and also made some scans. (The bread I had in the house at the time was white bread with sourdough and multigrain batch.)

Photographs:

Scans:

Further development ideas:

  • Either a plain white or black background could work to remove any distractions.
  • A cloth background over the bread while making scans could help prevent the overexposed areas around the edges of the crust.
  • Lots of different bread slices put together as a grid could work. (Like Penelope Umbrico’s ‘Suns from Sunsets from Flickr‘.)
  • Combining image and text could be an idea, for example, the price of each slice either over the image or as a caption or appropriated text from the packaging in a similar way to Martha Rosler’s ‘The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems‘.