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Beautifully lit, perfectly styled food photography is everywhere — in magazines, food blogs, and even Instagram, where your 10-year-old cousin is already expert at using natural light to make mom’s cooking look delicious. These images are usually carefully curated to project an image of an idealized existence where the chicken never burns and everyone is always smiling, perfectly coiffed round the table.

Dimly Lit Meals for One, a new book based off a popular Tumblr, serves up quite the opposite scenario. Author Tom Kennedy pairs grainy photos of barely (if at all) plated culinary monstrosities with a fictional tale about the sad-sack person who is likely eating it.

Real people submit the photos, often with a brief description of what the food in the image is — “because it’s not always very easy to tell,” Kennedy says.

Intentionally Awful Photos Of ‘Dimly Lit Meals For One’

Salk Institute,

by Louis Kahn / La Jolla, CA /1959-1965