Gut Check: Someone Swallowed This Pill Cam For The Sake Of Art

Leave it to those madcap Brits, artists Sam Bompas and Harry Parr, to offer a form of food photography you've likely never seen before. Last time we caught up with the duo, they'd created a newfangled whisky-tasting experience in the form of a vaporized tornado, and their latest project, "Memoirs of A Stomach," takes our zeitgeisty notions of food imagery, and turns them, literally, inside out.

For the reprinting of Sydney Whitting's bizarrely odd, Victorian-era book which chronicles life from the perspective of one's gut, Bompas & Parr enlisted the British chef, food writer and Sunday Times columnist Gizzi Erskine to swallow a miniscule pill-sized camera earlier this spring. As it documented its course through Erskine's digestive stystem, the camera's resulting images were interspersed throughout Whitting's text in what can now truly be called the enhanced, 150th anniversary edition.

"With food now among the most photographed subjects on the planet, we wanted to take a look beyond regular gastro-photography," said Bompas. Indeed, it's a drastic about face from the highly-stylized, food porn imagery flooding most of our Instagram feeds these days. Indeed, this new version of "Memoirs of a Stomach" takes food from farm to table, to mouth...and beyond.

The pill-cam, which Erskine swallowed live in front of an audience as part of King's College, London's Feed Your Mind Festival of Food and Ideas in March 2014.[/caption]
Bompas & Parr's newly reprinted version of Whitting's original Victorian-era novel, now bearing the likeness of Erskine's stomach—the inside of it—on the front cover.[/caption]
Three different scenes taken from Erskine's digestive tract.[/caption]

100 limited-edition copies of the book are currently available on the Bompas & Parr website (approx. $145).