Photography By Emily Gordon
Trophia
made in collaboration with Jordan Dahlan
Bodega Bay
2021
Trophia was a collaboration between myself and poet Jordan Dahlan. We looked towards the feast imagery seen on the Shield of Achilles in Homer's Iliad and conceived a project. I documented a bread recipe that is based upon carbonized bread forms discovered at Pompeii archaeological sites. Jordan responded to my images with a quadrant poem. In Erin Welty's Emblematic Eating: Reading the Feasts of the Iliadas Models for Social Order, Welty states "The Homeric feast as a literary space to resolve conflicts rests upon the notion of sharing, a fundamental element of the Homeric presentation of feasting. Many scholars note thatthe common Homeric term for feast, δαίς, shares a root with the verb δαίζω, meaning “to distribute or divide,” which frames the act of feasting in terms of the communal distribution of resources. The segmented bread evokes the notion of sharing and social restoration.