Sample

The food was arranged with their respective price tags in the window displays and, at first sight, Marco wondered whether the food was replaced each day in the windows.

[…] Only after lengthy observation did he realize that everything must be made of plastic. It was such an extraordinary imitation: food could never truly have had such genuinely bright colors or such a harmonious combination of tones.

Goffredo Parise, L’eleganza è frigida

The book casts a spotlight onto Japanese shokuhin sanpuru (food sample), which are perfectly faithful food replicas. Almost every restaurant in Japanese cities uses these three-dimensional copies to advertise their courses.

SAMPLE consists of a series of snapshots taken in the streets and restaurants of various Japanese cities, and a series of still life images shot by the author in his studio.
The idea was for the snapshots to resemble a mixed flow of food images, like the flow of images that often saturates those streets crowded with Japanese restaurants. The still life images on the other hand, deliberately in contrast to the snapshots, are intended to underline the suspended perfection of shokuhin sanpuru.

The series is a visual exploration that questions the redundancy of representation of food, but, more than anything, a meditation on still life and about the nature of copy and imitation.