cover of book
For my image archive book, I chose to find images of food carts throughout history in New York City. I started all the way in the 1900s with oyster vendors and I moved all the way to today with The Halal Guys. This book is treated like a timeline with the first pages being the earlier pictures and with the book ending with a picture took earlier this year. The pages fold out accordion style and the time line continues from front to back. In the middle of the book there is a layout specifically made for movies and tv shows that feature food carts that I wanted to include. The cover of the book is inspired by a food cart and I included wheels as well as the striped awning on top.
top view of book. the entire book consists of 4 different accordion pages
book closes with two fabric pieces being tied together
example of food illustration with price
On some of the pages, I also included a little illustration of the food item being sold in the picture along with a price of the good during that time. I wanted to do this in order to compare the prices of the items over time to compare the differences.One thing that is for sure is that street food has always been cheap and available to a majority of people. I decided to focus my research and image on history because the image of food carts from today are relatively similar. I think looking at the different carts and their individualistic signs and the different styles in carts is more interesting and I think there is a lot to learn from them. We can see the different forms of technology that was available to keep food cold or to cook food in the street.
Another detail that I wanted to include was the different font styles of the decades to compare the looks of each time period so I wrote out the year using a font that is reminiscent of that decade.
1900 written in a font from that decade
movie and television images layout
As we can see from all these images is that street food plays a large part in the culture of New York City and I don’t think they will be going any where any time soon.
