About the artist
Douglas Gayeton is an award-winning American multimedia artist, filmmaker, writer, and photographer. He is the author of SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town and has created award-winning work at the boundaries of traditional and converging media for National Geographic, PBS, Warner Brothers and Sony. Recent documentary projects include Lost In Italy, a series Gayeton created and directed for the Fine Living network, and Molotov Alva for HBO. His images are held in museum and private collections around the world, and have been featured in numerous print and online media, including Time Magazine. Gayeton lives on a farm in Petaluma, California with his wife, Laura, owner of Laloo’s Goat Milk Ice Cream, and their daughter, Tuilerie.
SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town Exhibit
Douglas Gayeton’ s SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town photo series is a magical and utterly unique portrayal of rural Italian life, and a tribute to the region’s kaleidoscope of charming local characters whose livelihoods and culture center on the everyday pleasures of growing, preparing, and eating food. Gayeton’ s photographs were first featured at Slow Food Nation, the Slow Food movement’s first ever event in the US which took place in San Francisco in September 2008.
The Lexicon of Sustainability
Pop-up Traveling Show
The Lexicon project is based on a simple premise: people can’t be expected to live more sustainable lives if they don’t even know the most basic terms and principles that define sustainability.
For the past three years Douglas Gayeton and Laura Howard-Gayeton have crisscrossed the USA to learn this new language of sustainability from its foremost practitioners in food and farming. Alice Waters on edible schoolyards. Wes Jackson on reinventing wheat farming. Joel Salatin on embracing the value of saner farming practices. Vandana Shiva on the global imperative of protecting seeds. Paul Stamets on how mushrooms can save the world. Will Allen on Food Security. Temple Grandin on the humane slaughter of animals. Farmer John on the revolutionary idea of community-supported agriculture.
In all, over one hundred leaders in food and farming from across the country have contributed their valued experiences to this rapidly growing Lexicon of Sustainability. These insights have been translated into large format “information art” photo collages and a series of short films.
By illuminating the vocabulary of sustainable agriculture, and with it, the conversation about America’s rapidly evolving food culture, the Lexicon project will educate, engage and activate people to pay closer attention to how they eat, what they buy, and their responsibility for creating a healthier, safer food system in America.
About the work
Gayeton’s photographs merge his interests in narrative, film, and interactivity. The work is concerned with how time is treated in photography. He has said, “I’ve always seen photography as being about a single moment, whereas film is about orchestrating a sequence of moments (scenes) to create a larger narrative.” To achieve this effect Gayeton’s works consist of up to a hundred photographs, often shot over the course of many hours. These are printed out then cut and pasted together to create a giant image. The smallest pieces are four by five feet; the larger one can cover a wall. The artist places a sheet of glass over the collage and hand-writes text over the picture then shots the whole thing again. Gayeton has called his approach “flat films”.
The Book
In 2009, Gayeton released his first book, Slow: Life in a Tuscan Town, which tells the story of the Slow Food Movement in Tuscany through a combination of photographs and essays. Chef Alice Waters wrote the introduction to the book, Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Movement, the preface.
SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town is the winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award for Best Coffee Table Book (Silver).
Photographs and text by Douglas Gayeton
Introduction by Alice Waters, Forewords by Carlo Petrini
Welcome Books
176 pages, 11” x 13”
75 sepia toned 4-color images 8 gatefolds Acetate jacket and 4 acetate tip-ins printed with Text from underlying images
Photographs © Douglas Gayeton with permission from the artist