Photographer Karl Baden has a longtime interest in visual arts and cultural packaging. His website features pizza box designs he’s collected.
(Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff)
G FORCE | KARL BADEN
Capturing a slice of life
Photographer Karl Baden has a longtime interest in visual arts and cultural packaging. His website features pizza box designs he’s collected.
(Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff)
Photographer Karl Baden is represented by the Howard Yezerski Gallery and teaches at Boston College. He has work in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. But his interest in visual culture extends well beyond his own use of the camera. Baden, 56, has a website, www.coveringphotography.com. It showcases book cover designs that incorporate famous photographs or are inspired by them. He also has a collection of pizza box designs.
Q. What gave you the idea for your Pizza Box Graphics page?
A. First of all, I’m no gastronome. Rather, my interests are the cultural typology of signs or graphics - or maybe, more simply, I just like to see how visual symbols are represented in our culture.
Q. So pizza boxes.
A. I thought about the classic depiction of the pizza chef. It’s usually an ethnic stereotype, with a handlebar mustache, smiling. I think this sort of guy was classically associated with mom-and-pop pizza places. In recent decades, as has happened to many other establishments, the corporations have moved in.
Q. There’s no Pizza Hut or Domino’s on your page. So that’s intentional?
A. It’s not that I don’t like them. It’s more of an idea about preserving something that’s more local or indigenous. Another kind of American spirit, I guess.
Q. You have 11 boxes up. Can we expect more?
A. The collection is completely worthless, as it should be. Usually, after I photograph them, I recycle them. But sure, if I see something, I grab it. That’s why I’m eager to see this [interview] run. If I go into a pizza shop and say “Can I have your pizza box?,’’ they’ll be a lot more interested if I’m credentialed by the Globe, as it were.
Q. Do you have a favorite design?
A. Actually, I do. My favorite design, and the one I’ve kept, is the God Bless America pizza box, from right after 9/11. It’s so representative of a particular cultural moment in time.
Q. What’s your regular pizza place?
A. It’s called the Village Kitchen, on Huron Avenue [in Cambridge]. The pizza is really good, though the boxes are not so interesting. Our backup is Armando’s, at the other end of Huron.
Q. Thin crust or deep dish?
A. That’s a tough one. I went to graduate school in Chicago, which was the home of the deep dish. At that time, I certainly preferred it. Right now, as someone in middle age who’s a little more careful about his health, I go for the thin crust.
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