#peter menzel

Photographs from two projects by photographer and author Peter Menzel, are currently on view at The Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art (formerly Polk Museum of Art), in Lakeland, Florida- Hungry Planet: What The World Eats, and Material World: A Global Family Portrait. Taken in the early 2000s and early 1990s, respectively, they provide a fascinating look at what people in various parts of the world were buying and eating at the time.

For Hungry Planet, Menzel and his wife Faith D’Aluisio visited families around the world to observe, photograph and record what they eat during the course of one week. They worked with twenty-five families in twenty-one countries. The two families in pictured above are the Revis Family from Raleigh, North Carolina and the Casales Family form Cuernavaca, Mexico.

For Material World, a project created in the early 1990s, Menzel assembled a team of photographers who spent a week living with families around the world who then photographed them outside their homes with everything they owned. Pictured below are the Hodson Family, from Godalming, England, and the de Goes Family, from São Paulo, Brazil.