Episode notes
On August 10, 1973, in a small Utah town, a man ordered pancakes. He never ate them warm. Fifty years later, that breakfast hangs in MoMA.
This week I sit with one single photograph: Breakfast, Trail's End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah, August 10, 1973. A short stack of pancakes, half a cantaloupe, a glass of milk, seen straight down from above, before the first bite. No people. No event. And yet you can look at it for a very long time and it doesn't run out.
The story behind it is the episode. Shore came back to a restaurant he'd shot the year before with a pocket camera, but this time he was carrying a 4x5 view camera. He stood on a chair, aimed a machine the size of a suitcase at his own untouched breakfast, and by the time he took the picture the food was cold. Everyone else in that room got a warm breakfast. He got a photograph. Which leads to the idea I can't forget: the photograph never shows you what it cost. And one more quiet trick, the angle. Straight down is not an artist's angle, it's the eater's angle. The picture doesn't show you his seat. It gives you his seat.
Your move this week: make one diary frame. One photograph of something completely ordinary, seen from above, titled the way Shore titles: place and date, a record, not a caption. No camera? At one meal this week, before you eat, name every object on your table silently and say the date to yourself. That morning will stick. The other ten thousand won't.
Coming Wednesday: the photographer who matters more to me than anyone we've covered. He helped invent Japan's most famous photographic style, killed it at its peak, burned his own negatives, lost his memory, and answered by photographing every day for forty years. Nakahira Takuma. He's the reason I hold a camera.
I'm Dan. This has been Negative Thinking. New episodes Wednesday and Saturday. Follow wherever you listen.
Film Enlarger — a home for your rolls. Free: filmenlarger.com