Les couleurs de la tentation : photographies culinaires, la couleur ou rien ?

At the start of this year celebrating the bicentenary of photography, the Bibliothèque Forney invites you on an emotional dive into the world of food photography through a selection of images dating from 1898 to the present day.

How do you whet the appetite through an image? A matter of taste? A matter of colour!

To represent a dish in a recipe book or in the "cooking" section of a periodical, or to promote a food product, drawing was long preferred to photography for technical reasons, but also socio-cultural and, above all, economic ones.

From the 1930s onwards, the use of photography—most often through black-and-white printing—began to become more frequent.

But it was thanks to advances in colour printing that the printed reproduction of a dish's organoleptic attributes could truly be complete, opening up a new space for memory and sensory projections.

• The speaker Her professional missions involving the promotion of artistic work among photographers in the gastronomy world led Anne-Claire Si Fodil to begin research into the history of food photography.

Since 2010, she has focused on tracing its evolution, paying particular attention to the visual markers of appeal.

She has given numerous talks on this subject, helped organise food photography exhibitions (FIPC), and also created workshops dedicated to putting food emotions into words.