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With more than forty photographers in thirty-five exhibitions in twenty-one venues in and about Odense, home of Hans Christian Andersen, the OFT addressed the global theme of food in compelling ways. The politics of food–production, marketing, and its effects on different populations–was a major theme. The economic nature of food was examined in imagery by Steven Benson of the farmers and fishers displaced during the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China; in Andreas Weinand’s elegiac work, “acker*arable land” (1999-2004), depicting holdouts of ecological farming in heavily industrialized Essen, Germany; in photojournalist Matthew Sleeth’s ironic take on grocery shopping, “Call of the Wild” (2004); and in Felicia Webb’s haunting project on obesity and bulimia in the West, “The Forbidden Body” (2006). On the other hand, Heidi Bradner’s series on food and survival in Siberia, “Midnight’s Lands” (2005); Angelica Julner’s imagery from small slaughterhouses in third-world communities, “Sand [Blood]” (2006); Numo Rama’s work from slaughterhouses in the rural Brazil of his birth, “Carnivores” (2006); and Finn Larsen’s two bodies of work on fishing and farming in Greenland, “Nerisassat [Food]” (2006) and “Tamaviaartumik [Passion]” (2006), told of worlds still directly connected to a socially integrated food chain.

Food as a socially binding material–think of families gathered around a meal, breaking bread, eating soup, etc.–has largely been displaced in the helter-skelter, shop/work-til-you-drop West. As “The Banquet,” the exhibition curated from the Museet for Fotokunst’s archive shows, it was not always so. In addition to images of families preparing and eating food in the 1800s and early twentieth century, there were more politically charged photos, such as those in “Zona,” Carl de Keyzer’s series of images from 2000-2003 of Russian prisoners in a Siberian camp sharing a skimpy meal. Nicolai Howalt and Trine Sondergaard exhibited “How to Hunt” (2005), an extended body of work about hunting traditions as a group activity that replicated traditional Danish landscape paintings from the early 1900s.

Of course, art and food have for thousands of years been part and parcel–from sixteenth-century allegorical Dutch still-lifes to more recent whimsical works such as Anne-Li Engstrom’s “Food Scapes” (2006) and Rafaelo Kazakov’s “Glut” (2000), which took a more macro approach to the shape and texture of edible flesh. Poul Ib Henriksen’s own still-lifes of various sea creatures doing impossible things, “Maritime Polaroids” (2006), were both delicate and playful while Sian Bonnell’s “Everyday Dada” (2006) reconstructed Dadaist and Constructivist icons of the 1920s and 1930s with slices of cheese and sausage or bread. The irrepressible Martin Parr depicted consumers and soon to be consumed foods–sausages, Halloween cupcakes, tins of fish paste–in his typically ironic and garish fashion in his series “Pantry” (2006). Russian photographer Vadim Gushchin brought majesty to the simplest of staples, bread, in his lyrical black-and-white images of loaves of bread set against unadorned, dark backgrounds.

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All this food for thought leads one to examine the role of a photography festival of this nature and its relative importance in the world of photography. The OFT is a rare species: intelligently curated, wide-ranging, and international in scope. In addition to presenting foreign artists to relatively tiny Denmark and exposing Danes to wider perspectives, the festival travels many of its shows, reversing the procedure by bringing Danes out into the world. Additionally, the OFT has a portfolio review component modeled on the format pioneered by the Houston FotoFest. Some twenty-four reviewers from nine countries brought their expertise to students and emerging artists over the course of two long afternoons. For young photographers the chance to meet with senior curators including Alejandro Castellote, a founder of Photo Espana; Andrea Holzherr of Magnum Photos, Paris; Vaclav Macek of Bratislava, Slovakia; Alison Nordstrom of George Eastman House in Rochester, New York; and Tina Schelhorn of Galerie Lichtblick in Cologne, Germany, allowed a wealth of information and experience that the Internet cannot replace even in totally wired Scandinavia. The honor reviewers brought to two photographers–Diana Scherer for her images of children and Ditte Haarlov Johnsen for her environmental portraits of friends in her adopted country of Mozambique–will be invaluable to their careers.