This shift did not occur statically, as if all one had to do was look through a camera lens and see place rather than smell or feel place. A place became more than a place, more than a territory or environment. A place became a "scape," a fluid image crossing over and through boundaries. Place melted from a solid to a liquid; the accelerated speed of image transmission pushed place into a new pattern of information, one that no longer relied on presence to figure material reality. Images moving in rapid succession, like a strip of film at the movies, appear fluid: a smooth stream of motion flickers across the screen. Scapes, likewise, are fluid. Not metaphorically, but materially. Places, now scapes, pour into individual and collective bodies, reacting with them as much as any other fluid--water, alcohol, coffee. The foodscape of New Orleans, for example, is at first limited by its material constraints, like a young body of water, but then as time progresses it begins to carve out a deep basin to become a river.
The fluid of places can be trapped, pushed through electric turbines in a dam, a practice that affords actors new capacities to generate complex material like the foodscape. A cookbook is such a dam. It impinges on the flow of a place, stealing image of New Orleans by drawing from the very technologies that created the flow in the first place. A photographic gaze not only accelerates image transmission, but also confines it, directs it, using it to capture scapes and generate new hybrid entities called foodscapes. Fluid place composed partly of food, foodscapes emerge from the intensity of flavor and temperature brought about by visual media. The foodscape capacities had yet to be realized, but they ranged from branding New Orleans an exotic Creole scape at the 1884 world's exhibition to casting Southern foodways as something available to San Francisco consumers in the wake of reconstructionist nostalgia in the U.S.
Photography and telegraphy first accelerated image transmissions, then were modified into machines servicing cookbooks (the photographic or telegraphic gaze). These visualizing machines caught the fluid scapes, converting them into cultural energy that could be used to produce foodscapes of various colors.
