Oliviero Toscani for the Slow Food Presidia

Renowned Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani has turned his lens on Slow Food Presidia products from around the world. The resulting series of 63 shots of 63 products is currently on display in a Tuscan winery, hung alongside faces from his Razza Umana (“human race”) project. The exhibition has been inspired by the Slow Food philosophy and by food as an expression of liberty and humanity.

The Presidia products come from countries as disparate as Sierra Leone, Romania, Italy and Brazil, plus many more, while the faces reflect a similar diversity, depicting people of different ethnicities that Toscani has met during his many travels. “We’re all different and there’s nothing strange about that,” Toscani told us. “Today’s problem, and the same goes for food, is that we’re afraid of diversity. It makes us insecure, and we prefer to be secure in our own mediocrity.” He continued: “Faces are human landscapes and each of them has its own particular beauty. Together they represent a great anthropological atlas, a great social factory, a lucid portrait of the time. Razza Umana is the search for the soul through human faces.”

His sentiments were echoed by Carlo Petrini, Slow Food’s founder and president. “Thirty years ago, nobody paid attention to food, but now we’ve gone too far, with cooking programs on every TV channel. Food can make us free if it returns to being ‘our’ food, in all existing and imaginable ways, according to different cultures and preferences.”

The photographs feature in the Cibo e Libertà (“food and freedom”) exhibition, at the Petra winery in Suvereto, in the province of Livorno, Tuscany. To book a visit to the exhibition: Cantina Petra Tel. +39 0565 845308 [email protected] www.petrawine.it The exhibition is open until September 2014, by appointment only.

See all of Oliviero Toscani’s Slow Food Presidia photos