This kitchen dialogue whips up an appetite!

Food photos

I wish an image could also smell somehow, I wish I could bring all these pictures to life for people to experience flavours from my country as much as I have enjoyed these,” says El Salvador-based shutterbug, Mayra Navarrete.

Drooling at the images of food – its ingredients and preparation from both India and El Salvador, assimilating into a  scrumptious-looking body of work, Metrolife indulged in ‘Kitchen Dialogues’, a photo exhibition by Mayra Navarrete and René Figueroa at Instituto Cervantes, recently.

The pictures entail stories of and around food doled out of Indian and Latin American kitchens; food that effuses aromas, tastes and spices up our lives. Taking Metrolife on a tour around the gallery, Mayra tells us, “There’s no segregation of pictures based upon the country of origin. We wanted Rene’s and my pictures to have a sort of dialogue. It’s for people to identify where they come from.”

That’s how the exhibition, in both colour and monochromatic hues, rolled out segments of pictures combining the vicinities of a Latin American streetside with the Indian household, emphasising upon the roles of women in a kitchen. Scrawled across the walls are notes such as “the discovery of a key ingredient when we are thousands of miles away from home, brings to our minds a traditional dish and along with it a cultural manifestation”.

When Mayra excitedly says, “I start salivating when I see this (image), the fact is just the memory of things is enough to enliven your childhood experiences,” one knows, how these memories form an indispensable part of her life.

The essence of the whole exhibition is to have a thought around how important the culinary aspect is in every culture. Dotting across the pictures are images of corn on the cob, shortly followed by kidney beans that are also an essential part of kitchens in El Salvador.

Equally captivating are images from the Indian kitchen with women cleaning wheat, making chapattis, chopping vegetables with a curved sickle attached to a wooden board and more. Mayra’s eyes light up explaining how she spotted the sickle in rural kitchens in India. “You cannot find this sort of a knife being used in Delhi, do you?” excitedly asks  the photographer whose frames share the novel experiences of her travel around India over the last four years.