In another thread, someone posted a link to this website which shows terrible food photography from the '60s and '70s. The thread itself was about the food, but I was wondering about the photography, and a mod suggested I ask in a fresh post.
I'm not a photographer, so I can't explain it clearly, but it seems to me that all the color photos there share similar unappealing qualities independent of the subject matter. Something in the lighting or focus, or perhaps artefacts due to film technology of the time. I'm almost certain I've seen the same qualities in other photos from the time that aren't food-related, but I have no examples to offer. I feel a modern photographer working with the same dishes would make them look vastly more appealing.
My question is, what changed around the late '70s, or early '80s that made that style of photography fall out of favor? Was it just fashion? Were there adcances in lighting or film chemistry? Am I just imagining it?
I'm coming around to this post really late but I've often wondered about this myself. I'm not a historian but in a 3-day old thread I don't think it matters. I am pretty knowledgeable about photography and painting as fields of fine art.
What I think it comes down to is that prior to the 60's it was pretty rare for photographs, much less COLOR photographs to be used in an advertisement for a product. Newsprint was the dominant media with a readership that far exceeded that of magazines or the audience of a television program.
Camera manufacturers, photographers, and film manufacturers were all heavily invested in black and white composition because the vast majority of all photographs published were black and white. Some publications such as Life magazine and National Geographic gained fame for publishing color photos but they were the exception, not the norm. If you weren't an experienced color photographer back then and you were hired to do a color photo shoot for some Jell-o recipe for a cookbook then you were probably just winging it with regard to the film stock, lighting, and equipment you were using. The people who had all of that stuff down solid were sure as HELL not shooting cookbooks.
If you look at the best examples of color photography from the time it's really NOT all that apparent from quality alone that they were taken in the 60's. That's because a terrific photographer who used the right film, equipment, and lighting was hired. The guy (or gal? I don't know) who took this picture probably never photographed a pot roast or Chevy Nova in his whole career:
It wasn't until the 70's/80's that it started to become economical to publish and advertise in color and it just took some time for a generation of advertising grade photographers to figure out what the hell they were doing. There was more and more work available in that field so it's understandable that more photographers started to specialize in making things look good in color under studio conditions. In the 80's a lot more periodicals and catalogs went to color and (perhaps more importantly) the newspaper insert became a thing. I remember my parents having the Sunday paper and a huge sheaf of color advertisements for would be stuffed in there.