Photographer Dan Bannino assembled the often ridiculous food regiments of celebrities and poised them dramatically in the style of master still life painters. Not only are they informative representations-at-a-glance of these high-profile food-consumer patterns, they also give them a very dignified sort of feel.
With this series my aim was to capture the beauty that lies in this terrible constriction of diets and deprivation, giving them the importance of an old master’s painting. I wanted to make them significant, like classic works of arts that are becoming more and more weighty as they grow older. My aim was to show how this weirdness hasn’t changed even since the 15th century.
Check all that cabbage soup Bill Clinton eats. Look at all that everything that Henry VIII ate. But it’s the little details that really make this series. See Kate Moss’s “Hollywood diet,” a minimal spread of martinis, cigarettes and generous lines of cocaine, punctuated by the surrounding translucent glass. And of course, behold Beyoncè’s “Master cleanse diet,” particularly the tea you drink all day instead of food and the cayenne pepper, salt and lemon you mix for a concoction to chug early in the morning. The stacks of toilet paper? You’ll need those, once that cayenne-salt-lemon mixture plows through your intestines and shoots out of your ass with any remaining liquified shit. (Photos: Dan Bannino)
