Food by Dutch artist Henk Wildschut is a project commissioned by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam after Wilschut’s refugee documentary series Shelter won best documentary project at the Dutch Doc Awards in 2011. After immersing himself in 34 innovative food production, inspection and research enterprises in the Netherlands for two years, Wildschut published an in-depth documentary photography book alongside exhibitions in the Netherlands and France.
While coming into the project with a strong distrust of the industry, Wildschut does not let his skepticism dominate his lenses. Following his slow journalism approach, Wildschut operates like a detached observer, presenting the reader with uncanny juxtapositions of narratives, and bringing to light a highly industrialized, policy/code driven food production landscape that is a far cry from the romanticized ideal that every consumer wants to hold on to. Instead of showcasing a miserable tale from the perspective of an animal in the animal agriculture industry, or the devastated outcome on the environment resulted from major exploitation of resources from the industry, Wildschut objectively depicts the plantations, laboratories, equipments, technology, and daily routines of employees. Through palpable visual clues or subtle underlying connections, the reader can construct their own takeaway from the images.
“The delicate balance between functional aesthetics and human drama” is how a curator describes Wildschut’s approach on his website. There is no denying that Wildschut’s art practice is bent on voicing his social-political concerns, from a semi-activist book project Sandrien about detained and unpaid ship workers from India in 2002, to a more recent project Ville de Calais which stems from a revisit of an informal refugee camp in Europe. However what’s refreshing about Wildschut’s work is that he does not dictate the underlying tone of the photographs, but lets them do their own storytelling in relation to a wider context.
As his biography says: “Wildschut’s projects are broadly about uprooting and alienation; about people who, through misfortune or other inescapable circumstances, find themselves forced to improvise in order to survive.” It makes me wonder whether the unfortunate subjects in the inescapable circumstances in Food are the animals in the animal agriculture business. And just when I am about to conclude that there might be a moral judgement here after all, Wildschut points out in the Epilogue that,
The discourse on food production can be infinitely refined and that this often puts supposed advantages and disadvantages in a new light. Scaling-up can actually enhance animal welfare, for example, and organic production is not always better for the environment. Often, an excessively one-sided approach to the subject of food is a barrier to real solutions.
Works Cited
Stok, Frank van der. “The delicate balance between functional aesthetics and human drama.”http://www.henkwildschut.com/work/biography/biography- henk-wldschut/.Accessed 21 Oct 2019.
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