Charles Roux , a Parisian photographer, describes himself as “a lonely boy” in his youth.
You could say that he was a “kid who filled his life and his voids with literary fiction.” Fictitious feasts The artist began to create his works in his early years when he would curl up with a good book and turn the pages, imagining worlds within them.
As a child, he had a vivid, visceral image of Alice’s Tea Party in Wonderland. He also had a picture of the dinner table in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and the wretched piles of rotting foods that his sister Grete would leave on the floor every morning in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. He was able to bring to life these scenes as an adult still-life photographer.
Roux believes that food has a special place in literature. The mundane becomes the magic. The photographer began with books for Fictitious Fare. He had an instant memory of some, such as the madeleines in Remembrances of Things Past or the porridge that G Oldilocks stole from the Three Bears. Some took longer to remember and find. He read the classics and reread them, took notes and drew table settings.
Roux’s goal was to recreate the perfect meal as part of a much larger project: he wanted to capture the essence and atmosphere of each novel, play and short story. He wanted to transport the audience to an era and place that had long since passed, or, in many cases, never existed. Woolf gave Roux a roadmap of sorts, and Beckett’s sparse stage directions, and his prose that is often opaque, left him plenty of room to fill in any blanks.
The photographer was very careful to not use the same prop twice. He searched thrift shops, antique stores and family collections for the perfect item. The artist cooked the food to match the descriptions of the book.
He had to get the shots as exact as possible. So he went to the Italian Alps in order to capture the Turkish delights that C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, James Joyce rented a cup with a mustache for Leopold Bloom to drink his tea in Ulysses. The picture that was inspired by We Have Always Lived In The Castle, by Shirley Jackson, was naturally shot in a castle.
Roux says, “I wanted to get to a place where fiction and reality met.” To keep with this notion, Roux ate the majority of the food after taking photos.
Fictitious feasts pays tribute to great writers, but it is also a tribute to their readers – the daydreaming kids of all ages who are unable to resist a good tale, even when the world fails them.
Charles Roux is looking for a publisher to help him turn FictitiousFeasts in a book. He says that a book will bring the project full circle, “from book-to-book.” You can track the development of the series on , Instagram.