Klaus Pichler's Subversive Still Lifes of Rotting Food

You may have heard about the UN's shocking announcement that one-third of the world's food is left to rot (as in, 1.3 billion tons.) It didn't take Austrian artist Klaus Pichler long to connect that finding to the fact that one in twelve people are malnourished and 16,000 children die each day from hunger-related causes. That's one child every five seconds.

So for his next body of work, Pichler decided to focus on all that wasted food in the photo series "One Third."

Images of beautifully-lit food at their peak of decay are shown side-by-side with reports issued by the UN"s Food and Agriculture Organization. Pichler's photos also play up the Food Supply Chain, the journey an agricultural item takes from the time it's picked, to the moment you toss it in the trash, tracking its origin, time of harvest, means of transportation, distance traveled and its carbon footprint.

"Unsurprisingly," Pichler says, "the worldwide percentage of food waste per person varies greatly: In Europe and North America, each consumer wastes between 95 and 115 kilograms of food, whilst only between 6 and 11 kilograms of edible goods are discarded per person in Sub Saharan Africa and South/ South East Asia. Considering the underlying reasons for food waste, however, comparisons between the global north and south seem to make a lot less sense: Taking a look at the ‘Food Supply Chain’, ranging from production, logistics and retail to the end con- sumer, it becomes apparent that losses occur at different stages of the process, depending on the standards of living in individual countries."

Read more of the report and see all the images, and if you're feeling particularly inspired by Pichler's (subversively) gorgeous still lifes, go ahead and check out one of 3rd Ward's photography classes.

Meanwhile:

-- Perrin Drumm