The physical remains of our mass-consumption litter the streets while the cheap foodstuffs pollute our bodies. All the while, the signs of fast food encroach upon us: advertisements and myths promote a brighter scenario allowing us to happily refuel at the drive-through window oblivious to the cycle that we perpetuate. Americans are slaves to an industry whose influence over our society we do not fully comprehend. Worse, we abet this national drama by worshipping the signs and totems of this junk food culture, proving that the billions spent on fast food related advertising are doing their job.

Using medium-format color film to translate the saturated colors and hyper-reality of this industry’s advertising conventions, my work seeks to obliquely answer the question, “To what extent has the fast-food industry’s marketing and nutritional practices affect Americans?” In Consumed, I interpret the act of eating to be a profession of ideology.

During travels around the U.S., I survey the landscape for signs and relics of the junk and fast-food industry. I am motivated by a foreboding sense of the absurdity of our situation. The convenience of modern living, and our easy access to ready “foodstuffs,” is destroying us, ruining our landscape, disenfranchising us from more wholesome ways of living, and we are the unwitting accessories to this crime.

This project was made possible through the support of the White House News Photographers’ Association, the Puffin Foundation, Center at Santa Fe, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

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