The multi-faceted visual artist Joseph Carlson
has been observing Balinese street food
culture with his camera for years. He composed this
book using selected images from his collection.
Carlson resides in Germany, where he is professionally based.
Bali's unique urban landscape is shaped by the street food and hot lunch carts
found everywhere. Their originality, striking colors, scents and sensuality enrich
island life in Bali's open spaces. Street food is poetry in motion. Through his images,
Joseph Carlson delivers a relentlessly accurate, up-close depiction of a cooking
culture rooted in ancient simplicity – making it tangible even for readers who have never
seen it with their own eyes. He reveals one succulently exotic moment after another, putting
his own fresh and unexpected slant on each of them.

Foodhunter Mark Brownstein layers this series of images with anecdotal commentary
making each of the images that much more alive.
California native Mark Brownstein travels the globe
in search of innovative taste sensations.
The foodhunter describes Asia's street food
as a life-changing discovery.
The book „mobile food and foodhunting“ triumphantly brings its content to life. The main theme of the book is not the cookshops of Bali, but rather the direct, visceral experience of this time-honoured culture. More than just documenting the subject matter it investigates, it conjures up the power of first-hand experience.
The reader accompanies Joseph Carlson on a photographic journey that is capable of transcending the limitations of the camera. As such, the audience has first-hand access to what Carlson perceived while walking along the island’s streets. The book creates a deeply poetic and sensual experience.
The text of the book – the personal accounts of foodhunter, Mark Brownstein – forms a single line that extends 27.3 metres from the first page to the very last. This gives the book both a sense of direction and a set route to follow. The journey is a process of experience and cognition, travelling a path of ever-original images.
Every time I go on my great journeys
of discovery, to far off places,
with scrumptious delicacies –
innovative flavours, providing an
endless source of inspiration –
I find myself ever more connected
to street food culture.
It is a culture with a rich and layered
history, I've seen and felt all over the world.


mark brownstein