Some ideas are so simple that they feel inevitable in hindsight, and so punishing to execute that nobody had actually bothered to make them before. This is one of those.
In 2014, the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant was putting together a documentary photography special on the theme of food, and invited the Amsterdam studio Lernert & Sander to contribute an image. What came back was a photograph of 98 pieces of unprocessed food, every one of them cut down to exactly 2.5 x 2.5 x 2.5 centimeters, laid out on a staggered grid against a soft grey sweep.
With no CGI, AI, or compositing. Beef, tuna, mackerel, watermelon, dragon fruit, romanesco, red cabbage, corn, leek, purple cauliflower, all of it carved by hand and photographed as a single frame.
Aesthetically processing the unprocessed
The concept came out of a conversation the studio was watching play out everywhere in the mid-2010s, and which has only intensified since.
Everyone had suddenly become preoccupied with provenance: where the food came from, whether it was local, whether it had been touched by a factory.
Artists Lernert Engelberts and Sander Plug later told CNN their response was to “aesthetically process the unprocessed.”
That is a genuinely sharp joke, and it is the reason the picture has legs. Nothing here has been cooked, cured, emulsified or extruded.
Every cube is a raw ingredient in its purest state.
And yet the image reads as the most industrially processed thing imaginable, a factory output, a Pantone chart, a set of pharmaceutical samples.
Purity and manufacture turn out to look identical when you apply enough geometry.
The grid does the work
What makes this more than a novelty is the arrangement. A staggered grid is a flattening device: it removes hierarchy, kills composition, refuses to tell you where to look. Every ingredient gets exactly the same square footage.
Marbled beef sits at the same rank as a piece of white onion. The most expensive thing in the photograph and the cheapest thing in the photograph are impossible to tell apart by status, only by color.
Stripped of shape, silhouette and plating, the only information left is surface. So you start reading food the way you would read a minimalist artwork, by texture and hue alone.
The cross-section of a leek becomes a set of nested arcs. Red cabbage becomes a purple-and-white marbled stone.
A corn cob, sliced through, turns into a tiny stack of yellow bricks. Half the pleasure of the image is the slow work of identification, which is precisely what happened when it went online: Reddit spent days trying to name all 98.
It belongs in the same family as knolling and the flat-lay, the quiet art of arranging objects, where the grid itself is the argument.
Some foods refuse
Look closely and the perfection develops cracks, which is the best part. A green bell pepper is mostly air, so its cube caves inward at the corners.
Purple cauliflower sprouts out past its own edges like something growing back. Broccoli and romanesco fray at the top face because they simply do not have enough mass to hold a plane.
The studio let those stay in. A version of this image where all 98 cubes were flawless would be a much duller picture, and a slightly dishonest one. The failures are where you can still feel the hand and the knife.
Where to see it
Cubes was shot by Lernert & Sander with lighting and technique by Ram van Meel, commissioned by de Volkskrant. The studio still offers it as a signed 52 x 42 cm offset poster, along with a framed limited-edition C-print, through lernertandsander.com.
The duo have been working together since 2007, and the same instinct runs through the rest of their catalog: take one obsessive idea, then follow it further than anyone reasonably would. They once blended every fragrance released in a single year into one bottle. They made a film about the ways a chocolate bunny can melt.
More than a decade later, this photograph still circulates constantly, and it still stops us. It is a reminder that you do not need scale or spectacle to make an image that lodges in people’s heads. You need one clean idea and the patience to cut 98 cubes by hand.
