Inkjet prints
Software used: Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop
16" x 11"
2019
“Fast Food Dates” is a project concerned with making prolonged and communal a process – buying and consuming fast food – that is by design brief and impersonal. Meaningful yet ordinary interactions take center stage in this series, as the viewer is invited to take a seat and relish in a quick meal ostensibly no different from any other. The photographed scenes could occur on any given day; they are worthy of capture for no reason other than that they represent the sentimental idea that each moment with a loved one is worth cherishing. Of course, the experience of consuming fast food is inextricably commercial, with the act of seeking humanity in a McDonald’s representing complicity in the transitional, hyper-efficient ethos it attempts to subvert. The process of photographing this series was not, then, one of altering the all-too-familiar façade of a fast food joint to suit a grand artistic scheme, but rather one of acknowledging the inherent complication and potential beauty of locations and relationships too often deemed liminal or commonplace. Like a bite of a cheap cheeseburger, a fast food date doesn’t need to be momentous to be a moment worth savoring.
