The Extreme-Milkshakes Trend Just Completely Imploded
By Sydney Mondry
ALL PHOTOGRAPHED BY ALANA DIMOU.
The milkshake game in Australia is blowing up. The popular sweet creations look like they’ve exploded the contents of a candy shop or bakery. Milkshakes in behemoth mugs are topped with gummy worms, doughnuts, caramel corn, candy floss — seemingly nothing is off-limits. So, Sydney, Australia-based photographer Alana Dimou decided to send up the trend in the most hilarious way possible, topping the frozen treat with everything from hamburgers to an entire roast chicken.
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When we asked Dimou what inspired her parody images, she explained over email:
I suppose I’m particularly interested in seeing food in new ways, so after being bombarded for weeks with photos of Sydney’s extreme milkshakes, imagery began to culminate in my mind until all I could see was a scene of comical excess people would want to Instagram. This project isn’t inspired so much by the milkshakes, but the frenzied response of everyone who must wait in line to attain and Instagram one.
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Click through to see Dimou’s monster milkshakes in action and check out our interview with her about the series. Prepare to never look at this dessert the same way again.
How long did it take to set up each shake?
“Not too long. Shopping, styling, shooting, and cleaning up was all done in the same day, by the afternoon. I did spend a while frying up meat and bacon alone at home to make this happen; it was very unglamorous behind the scenes.
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"Which shot was the most challenging?
"They all had their challenges. The chook [whole chicken] was leaking meat juice down the side of the jar, the burger shake was making it rain tomato sauce everywhere, and the whipped cream (of all things) on the bakery shake was setting it off balance.”
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What sort of props or tools did you have to use to get it all to stick together?
“Nothing at all. I’m into keeping my photography as real as possible. All it took was some considered stacking and gravity being awfully kind to me. There are no hidden skewers of scaffolding hiding in these.”
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Do you usually photograph food, or was this a new endeavor?
“I work as a food photographer, and lately I’ve been trying to find new ways to talk about and illustrate food. Every day, we’re bombarded with the same glossy imagery in magazines, or everybody’s birds-eye Instagram of lunch (I’m plenty guilty of this, too), and in terms of personal branding, all of these images act as a facade of a perfect life through scenes of perfect food… Things are staged to make our lives look wonderful.
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"I’ve been speaking about this all very seriously, so to put [it] very simply: I watch too many cartoons. I imagined something stupid, and I made it real. And, [I] laughed like an idiot to myself the whole time I was doing it. Then, [I] laughed some more as I watched people across the internet getting mad, as they had missed the key element in all of this: parody.”
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Did you taste one after the shoot?
“Uhh, no. I had some milk, some bacon, and a spare donut for my home studio lunch. Again, very unglamorous.”
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