Stay up off my Instagram

During the mid-teens of the twenty-first century, an obscure Hi-Phop^* artist by the name of Shéyaa Bin Abraham-Joseph was asked during an interview what the tattoo of a cross on his forehead signified. His carefully considered reply was: “issa knife.”

Unparalleled post-modernist fare though it be, Mr. Abraham-Joseph’s impressive oeuvre calls to mind a rather more middlebrow, post-modernist obsession, sometimes known as “camera eats first.” This is the practice of meticulously photographing your food before consuming it.

Given that we live in the era of the mashup, and that no one is better attuned to pop culture than I am, it was all but inevitable that—like a modern-day roomful of monkeys with typewriters—I would, eventually, combine Mr. Abraham-Joseph’s insightful phraseology with my own high art, resulting in the thoughtfully captioned alimentary daguerreotypes reproduced below.

In addition to the captions themselves, you may also enjoy some of the links included therein. Feeding the camera first is nothing, if not a labour of love.