Postcards Reliefs - Book of Bread

These twelve anonymous photographs come from a collection of around 40 black-and-white and colour images of British and Irish loaves and slices of bread, created to illustrate a pioneering work on bread chemistry: Owen Simmons’s The Book of Bread, published in 1903. Over 400 pages and seven chapters, this precursor to molecular gastronomy presents the conclusions drawn from more than 360 of the author’s own experiments. Its illustrations have been praised by Martin Parr and other photographers as anticipating the conceptual art of the 1980s.