Culinary magazines like Milk Street and Bon Appétit take great pride in their photography. A lemon wedge or broccoli floret never looks that good on our counter. Christopher Boffoli also photographs food, but in a much different way. He might place miniature construction workers peering into a cracked egg, or have a tiny toy man with a tiny snow blower spraying powdered sugar onto a doughnut. For more than 20 years, he's been creating his series Big Appetites.
"One of the reasons I chose food in the beginning was that I thought it had beautiful color, texture and geometry, but also it had a lot of variety. I knew that I'd never run out of ideas."
His work has been published in more than 100 countries and is, in his words, surprisingly popular. His photographs will be exhibited at MIXD Gallery in Rogers June 5 through 28.
There's pop culture precedent for seeing tiny people up against big things. Think of movies like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, or the Ty-D-Bol Man commercials from the '70s and '80s. Christopher says those images made an imprint on him when he was growing up. And then later, he was inspired by a series called Travelers, created by Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz, placing miniatures in snow globes.
"I kind of loved that idea, because snow globes are something that are whimsical from childhood that really draw you in with the expectation that you're going to see something charming and whimsical. And often the scenes would be disturbing. There'd be people dropping children in a well, or something very dark, and you sort of find yourself laughing, although you shouldn't.
"So yeah, I think one of the things I found with this work is that it works better if you imagine yourself as the 20-millimeter figure and give the characters a destiny. It's not enough just to take a character and put it on a cupcake and say, well, there's the image. It works better if you imagine, well, if I were standing next to a 30-foot high tower of chocolate cake, would this be scary? What would I do here? So giving them a task definitely helps me to find the designs sometimes."
An English major in college, he says he's an accidental visual artist, albeit one very much at home with his concept.
"I had played with Matchbox cars as a kid. I had model railroads and electric slot cars as a kid as well. So I think all children are familiar with toys because we have them in childhood. It's one of the most common elements of every culture in the world. And then obviously food is also another common thing, very accessible to everybody."
Tiny human skiers navigating the whipped cream paths on a banana split, or a mini swimmer floating in a spoon of Cheerios, can be unexpected, delightful and humorous, while also addressing American phenomena like large serving portions and overconsumption.
"Ideas can come from anywhere. Sometimes it will be a fully sketched-out idea. Other times I'll be in a restaurant and get the sudden urge to create something based on the geometry of what I'm seeing. Other times it will start with a figure. I have this little guy who's jackhammering something. Okay, is he going to be jackhammering a walnut shell, or is it going to be a Charms Blow Pop? So it can really come from anywhere. You just need to be open to it.
"One of my most famous images is called Zesty Mower, which is a woman mowing an orange. That image wasn't planned at all. I wasn't even shooting that day. I was cleaning out a kitchen drawer, getting organized, and I found this citrus grinding tool I'd forgotten. I kind of pulled out an orange and started making this channel in the rind. And I thought, wait a minute, I've got this lawn mower. The scale is about the same. I set up a backdrop, and in about 15 frames and 10 minutes, I had this image."
That piece became an iconic representation of the series, appearing on the cover of Christopher's book and selling out in some print sizes. His work is playful in nature, but it is work. Getting his tiny people to do what he wants and stay that way long enough for studio work isn't easy.
"Most common exercise I do in the studio is squats, because I'm always dropping things on the floor. I live and work in Seattle, where it's a felony to be under-caffeinated. Doesn't always go along very well with working with three-quarter-inch figures."
These toy people are usually not created to stand on their own, so he's developed types of putty, thin armatures and wires to hold his mini models in place. He refuses to incorporate AI in his work. It is practical photography with a bare minimum of digital cleanup. Liquids can be especially vexing. Though, one of my most popular photographs is a thumb-sized scuba diver bobbing in a glass of champagne.
“I did it right before a New Year's one year, and it's been very popular. It presented its own problems — bubbles forming on the figure. There's another one called Canoe where there's literally milk that was poured onto a surface and was moving as we were trying to get it photographed and lit. They’re rare but they’re out there.”
Then there is Iwo Cupcake. That's the result of a perfect recipe of the right tiny people and the right surface.
“I was just by chance able to find three or four workers and position them in a way that looked like the famous Iwo Jima photograph from World War II, on top of a cupcake. I remember just feeling really entertained that that worked. Most often, shooting things is not fun. Things don't work. You often have an idea in your mind of how something should look, and you're always chasing that idea and it never quite gets there. Maybe if you're lucky you get 90% of what you had in mind, sometimes it doesn't work at all. You just abandon the idea or come back to it later. But that was one of the rare times when I remember laughing at the images as they were happening."
Examples of Christopher Boffoli's Big Appetites series will be exhibited at MIXD Gallery in Rogers beginning Friday and lasting through June 28. He spoke from his home in Seattle.
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