I never really expected to, but somehow I got pretty good at food photography. My sistere had started a food blog to showcase some of her various culinary masterpieces, and quickly realized that in the food blog world pictures really matter. We started off with some bold backgrounds, and then tried some patterned ones, and while the pictures turned out alight, there was just way too much busy-ness overall. Plus the food itself was being affected, as the light casts from the colors in the background ended up casting a curious pall over what was on the plate. Another hurdle was living in an apartment. It had fairly good lighting, but initially we were taking pics right before we ate, which meant that it often happened at night or in the late afternoon. And since we hadn’t really spent any money on professional lighting, half of the time we were taking pictures using just the standard tungsten lights in the ceiling. Hint: this is not kind to food either! Eventually (after a lot of research) we discovered that the keys to great food photography were lots of natural light and neutral backgrounds. We scoured around trying to find something that would work, and eventually found a random old weathered barn door at an antique mall and some old burlap sacks. We also began planning to take pics when we could get the best lighting, which meant sometimes she made food just for the pictures. Focusing on the aesthetics in this manner made a huge difference, and our pictures began turning out far better. By the end of this experience we were planning out shoots with props, accent colors in the napkins, and even the angle and arrangement of the plate. All this thought and effort ended up making already amazingly delicious food look even more delicious. Needless to say, I heartily approved of all of this since I got lots of yummy things to eat. In retrospect, the really interesting thing about food photography was that for all of the intrinsic deliciousness of the food (especially the bacon-lined cinnamon roles!), a really good picture and presentation of that food made it even more delicious. This is a well-known phenomenon, which is why restaurants and such go to a lot of effort to make their food look really good in the advertisements. More upscale restaurants will additionally craft a meal and meticulously lay it out on the plate, all in an attempt to accentuate the flavor and the experience. The end result is of course that what otherwise might be a really good dish can all of sudden become unforgettable, leaving you wanting more. This rather lengthy introduction is hopefully a fairly transparent analogy to the role of aesthetics in our presentation of the gospel. In the same way that delicious food can become more enticing because of a well-taken photo or a well-thought out presentation, so the gospel can become more attractive because of the manner in which we communicate it. There are of course numerous caveats to this principle, for, after all, the work of the Holy Spirit in the human heart is naturally a supernatural work. Yet on the other hand we are clearly called to take some role on the proclamation of the gospel, as St. Paul states, co-laborers in this endeavor. Aesthetics comes in to play because as embodied beings we are as much a body as we are a soul. The Gnostics of old believed the body to be the prison of the soul, just another material evil; the Iconoclasts in similar fashion imagined that piety is a matter of mind and not of sense. But through the centuries the Christian theological tradition has affirmed both the goodness of the body and- in rather spectacular fashion- that by means of a body God brought about the salvation of our race. Much as we might wish to be creatures of the mind, we are constantly drawn back to earth in our desires, our emotions, our passions. These aspects of our nature cannot be excised without ridding us of that which makes us human; as such, the entirety of our experience forms the way in which we see the world and influences what we think and what we believe. The rhetoricians of antiquity understood this very well; man cannot be persuaded by logic and argument alone, but must be drawn along into the truth by means of his senses, his sensibility and his emotions. The truth is such a big and looming thing, but is dappled in its apprehending. These various parts of our nature weave a sort of tapestry as we come face to face with it- our mind sifting through propositions, our senses forming connections to our experience, our emotions and passions drawing loops and threads through the heart so as to give us that fire inside to cling to what is real and what it true. The gospel- since we believe it belongs to truth and is in fact identical with truth- likewise is not merely a series of propositions, but neither is it just an experiential exercise nor a message meant to tug at our heartstrings. Rather, the truth is ultimately meant to undergird all these things, and to draw the entirety of who we are into its enfolding grasp. This might seem a bit ponderous, but it is in this crucial intersection of truth and the one who seeks the truth that aesthetics have their teeth. Beauty, after all, is convertible with truth, and thus beauty can be a kind of epistemological backdoor to truth. Since we are embodied creatures, we are drawn by the beautiful since it resonates with the deepest part or us, because- truth be told- we are made for it. The beautiful gives us the sense of transcendence, which is the universe’s sneaky way of pointing us to God. And to be sure, God can do as he pleases and- as the Scriptures say- draws those to himself whom he will. But at the same time, this same God is the one who needed nothing but yet chose to create unfathomably massive spiraling galaxies and burning points of light hanging in the seeming emptiness of space; who crafted rising mountains that threaten to pierce into the heavens and restless oceans that stretch on in a mimicry of their eternal artisan; who breathed life into the dust and took on that same form to draw us into union with him. Simply put, aesthetics matter because they certainly seem to matter to God, who formed all the beautiful-ness of being in all its multi-facteted wonder out of the vast expanse of nothingness from the sheer gratuity of his love. If the very essence of who we are and the reason for our being is that God chooses to make beautiful things, then how could we but help but want to make the world a little more beautiful, and to make the gospel a little more tasty?
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 06:18:08 +0000