Beyoncè, Master Cleanse Diet

Bill Clinton, Cabbage Soup Diet

In Still Diet, Italian photographer Dan Bannino elevates the seeming frivolity of celebrity fad diets to the realm of high art, shooting the often heavily restricted meals consumed by Beyoncè and Gwyneth Paltrow in the style of Old Master still lifes. In his well-lit apartment studio, Bannino imagines the dinner setting after the “meal”. The table, not yet cleared, is still stained and littered with the uneaten remnants and refuse, allowing us to soak in the array of ripened fruit, cold eggs, and smoked cigarettes.

Sprinkled amongst today’s tabloid superstars are legends from the past, like the poet Lord Byron, King Henry VIII, and Venetian nobleman Luigi Cornaro, who throughout the day deprived himself of all nourishment save for the meat of a single egg. Diets both gluttonous and fatally scarce are both seen with the same exacting eye, under the same ethereal, nearly divine light. Here, the centuries seem to compress, bound together by an unsettling, pervasive obsession with food and fame.

Gwyneth Paltrow, Strict Detox Diet

Charles Saatchi, Eggs Diet

Luigi Cornaro, Sober Life

Kate Moss, Hollywood Diet

Henry VIII, Banquet Diet

Simon Cowell, Life Enhancing Diet

Lord Byron, Romantic Poet’s Diet

via Design Boom