Tasty: John Dominis’ Classic Food Photography

The art and craft of photographing food is now so much a part of our visual landscape—in magazines, on billboards and subway posters, on websites and elsewhere—it’s easy to imagine that inventive food photography has been around since the dawn of the medium. In fact, for a very long time, the vast majority of pictures of food were just kind of . . . blah. Appetizers, entrees, desserts and drinks—a cake, a pot roast, a salad, a martini, whatever—were arranged in a straightforward way on a table or a kitchen counter, exactly the way one would encounter the delectables in real life.

Fifty years ago, however, in its Jan. 31, 1964, issue, LIFE magazine launched its famous (among foodies, anyway) “Great Dinners” series, and helped re-imagine what food photography could be. “The dinners are festive,” LIFE’s editors wrote of the meals they would present in the series, “and yet simple to cook. Because no feast is created entirely in the kitchen, the stories will offer—along with recipes—advice on how to prepare ahead, shop efficiently, serve with style. A complete menu will be given for each meal.”

Throughout the long and popular run of the monthly series, some of LIFE’s most celebrated photographers contributed to Great Dinners, with one name in particular, John Dominis, appearing again and again, in issue after issue. Throughout his career, Dominis’ uniformly excellent work across wildly disparate subjects pegged him as one of LIFE’s most versatile talents—and his photos of food certainly contributed to that reputation. As LIFE.com wrote in a Photographer Spotlight on Dominis:

Here, LIFE.com presents a sampling of Dominis’ food photography—pictures that came naturally to the man, in a sense, as he loved to cook. (His father was a chef and restaurant owner in Los Angeles.)

“We decided to shoot large close-ups that made the food look good to eat,” Dominis once wrote about the Great Dinners pictures, “instead of the popular style [at the time], decorated with flowers and candles.”

Dominis also found creative ways to make dishes look especially enticing. For example, his picture of a Rolled Roast, photographed in a roasting container that’s been cut in half (slide #5 above), appears to have been pulled moments before from an oven. But that’s cigarette smoke, not a savory steam, pouring from the pot—smoke blown in there, Dominis later noted, “to make it look yummy.”