Jennifer Williams 10/03 On David Halliday

Right now, through February 21, 2010 you can see "Culinary Delights: Photographs by David Halliday," at the San Antonio Museum of Art. The photographs are a celebration of food through both black and white, and color photography. All of Halliday's images are shot with film, although it is just recently that he found his love for color in photographs.

When shooting in black and white, Halliday develops his prints as sepia-toned silver gelatin prints in the darkroom, and when shooting in color, he scans the film into the computer and does some work in photoshop. By scanning into the computer he is able to recreate the exact color, or achieve a result he was unable to achieve in the camera by tweaking the images. Halliday compares photoshop to being in the darkroom, which I think is an excellent comparison. Dodging, burning, adjusting contrast and color saturation, etc., are all darkroom essentials, and photoshop is a simply another tool with which a photographer is able to achieve the desired result.

Halliday had a career as a chef in New Orleans, when his love for photography began to take over. He remembers photographing a still-life, an arrangement of hats that had caught his eye, and being amazed at the beauty of it. From this point on he began setting up different food items in aesthetically pleasing arrangements which seem to give the food sense of life, of anthropomorphism. His sense of light and tonality, and the clarity of his images is astounding. No image loses a single detail, and even the frames serve only to accentuate the beauty and precision of his work.

When looking at Halliday's photographs, either in sepia, or color, one cannot help but notice the reference to classical and traditional still-life paintings... but Halliday brings his own style to the images. He celebrates the form of his subject, and gives it a life and personality of it's own. Also. it seems that he brings from his life as a chef not only his subject matter, but his timing, his precision, his presentation. He himself said that the two are similar in that one must pay attention to the subtleties. And let me tell you, his subtleties are what make his images simply delectable!