‘My Camera Eats Last’: Missy Flynn Picks Her One Work

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Daniel Spoerri‘s tableaux-pièges (snare pictures) immediately spoke to me: cluttered tabletops full of used tableware, glued in position immediately after a meal and displayed vertically on the wall.

The experience of a meal, for me, goes beyond the food itself. Like Spoerri, I love to eat, but I also enjoy understanding the world around me through food and consumption.

As a restaurateur who serves food professionally, I see Spoerri’s work reflected back to me daily in images clogging up my social media feeds and my own camera roll. I think about tableaux-pièges almost every day.

Spoerri’s series evokes the conviviality of a meal in its purest sense: as an aftermath, a mess, a cluster of emptied plates and half-full glasses. The meals in his works don’t always feel finished to me. They hold on to the possibility of something more: another round of drinks, dessert; smoking cigarettes around the table into the small hours... I like to imagine who could have been eating at those tables and what they did next.

The tableaux-pièges remind me of the days before social media apps redefined how we eat. In my own restaurant I have endured being shooed away from waiting tables because my shadow was interfering with the ‘flat lay’, that much-coveted overhead shot perfectly suited to Instagram. We have had guests order multiple dishes and request them ‘all at once’ in order to build a busy table top à la Spoerri; I always mean to ask if they have seen them. All of this happens before the first bite has been taken and in some cases—the most tragic of occasions—no bites are taken at all. Now, the camera eats first.

Often when I clear tables, I can’t help but enjoy my bird’s-eye view of the scene. These are my own snare pictures and they are much more delicious to the eye. Sometimes I take out my phone to capture it. My camera eats last. —[O]