There’s food porn — teasing photographs of donuts glistening with a fresh coat of glaze, artfully arranged plates looking like architectural plans, footage of cakes being frosted as the icing is skillfully stroked across each plump layer — and then there’s food porn. Real food porn. With extreme emphasis on the porn.
Although, to be fair, Tony Stamolis’ upcoming book — T&T&A, which will be available in March 2010 — is more in the food erotica category. This isn’t hard-core food porn by any means, nor is it vaguely disturbing soft-core food porn like this Aria Giovanni shoot (warning: that link is extremely NSFW). Instead, Stamolis explores the warm, amber worlds of sunlight-tinted erotica and corn tortilla-tinted tacos — each world with its own rainbow of ingredients and flavors.
Thumbing through the book, we began to notice a pattern emerging among the dozens of photos of mostly-naked women and tacos splayed open on styrofoam plates. Whether by conscious effort or not, the women and the tacos seem to match — the reddish-orange tiles behind one model echoing the fiery color of the annatto-hued cochinita pibil on the adjacent page, the tangle of lettuce and shredded cheese on opened tacos mirroring the focus of the slightly spread legs of a young woman — and a strange sort of joy enveloped us as we watched the two worlds blur satisfyingly together.
Below are a few of our favorite shots from T&T&A, which Stamolis describes as a “mission to document the ‘other’ California — not the airbrushed celebs of Beverly Hills or those slick Silicon Valley VCs, but a world that is lo-fi and lustier: a world of scorchingly sexy women and gut-wrenching Mexican street food.” We approve.
Warning: The rest of this post is NSFW — not safe for work (or wives, probably).
This article appears in Nov 5-11, 2009.