When I moved to Brooklyn in 2005, I noticed people building restaurants and bars that looked like 1950s diner-style restaurants, with soda fountains and lunch counters. I’m from Canada and I don’t think there’s a period that Canadians look back on with such nostalgia. I grew up on Vancouver Island watching old US movies and thinking, as I looked across the water towards America, that they showed what the country must look like.
But our idea of those times is not firsthand, and I got really curious about that, and the fact that those days were not better for most people, only a few. That false, nostalgic feeling has become dangerous, with Trump’s “make America great again” rhetoric.
In 2013, I started to drive around smaller towns in Pennsylvania to look at places that remain from the 50s. There are towns where maybe the mine closed, or the highway moved, and so – unlike the diners in New York, which keep getting renovated and extended – these places stayed as they were. It feels like the past and the present are somehow taking place at the same time. It’s really beautiful.
In 2015, I started an Instagram account called American Squares, which is more about nostalgia than it is nostalgic. When I look at these prefabricated diners that rolled off assembly lines, so beautiful in their details, I think about how the people who invented them would be shocked that we’re looking back now in this way. They were trying to get to the moon: they were future-oriented people.
I first came across this particular hot dog joint in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, called the Very Best, in around 2016. I noticed that it had a lovely Vitrolite storefront and a great typographic sign. It had closed the year before, having originally opened in 1921. But then a local took it on, restored it beautifully and reopened it in September 2019. When I passed by again in 2021, the owner was following social distancing guidelines, which is why it was so quiet.
I’m often looking to give a sense of time and place to my photos, and one clue is the image of Hall and Oates on the jukebox. Daryl Hall is from Pottstown and John Oates grew up in the same county. The vintage arcade game Centipede was developed by Atari and co-designed by Dona Bailey – one of only a few female game programmers in the industry at the time. It was one of the first arcade games with a significant female player base.
I was working on a series that eventually became my book Lunch Poems, in which this image appears. I focused on communal settings, or “third spaces” outside of home and work. We lost those spaces for a period during the pandemic and we all suffered for it in ways we maybe haven’t fully acknowledged yet.
The Very Best was a beloved third space in this town, where you could stop and chat, where everyone was super-friendly. There was at one time a waitress who had worked there for 44 years. But I chose to photograph this business empty. What photographers leave out of the frame often influences the final meaning as much as what we include. There is a conspicuous absence of people in the pictures in this series and that’s a construct, a metaphor for having been kept apart by the pandemic, driven to despair and divided by politics. I wanted to show the separateness and the emptiness. When we look at these pictures we might ask, “What happened here?” or “What will happen next?”
The Lunch Poems photographs paint an almost postapocalyptic scene. Not all the pictures in the book were made during the pandemic, but that was the prism through which I began to look at the finished images, and it shaped the editing process.
I frame my photographs carefully to explore what I want to communicate. For this series, if a space was crowded, I waited for people to leave. Or I arrived just as it was opening or closing. I do wonder whether that was always responsible, as I’m guessing the business owner doesn’t want their restaurant to be captured as melancholic and empty. But rather than an actual place as it is in reality, I’m photographing an idea I’m thinking about, and that I hope others may understand and reflect upon.
Leah Frances’s CV
Born: Alert Bay, British Columbia, Canada.
Trained: Self-taught; then an MFA from the Tyler School of Art & Architecture, Philadelphia.
Influences: ‘For this series, Bruce Wrighton, Birney Imes, William Eggleston. For colour, Wim Wenders. For poetry, Gerald Stern.’
High point: ‘The first time the New York Times Magazine published my work.’
Low point: ‘Maybe now. I’ve gone deep down a rabbit hole, spending years on a new project which, at this point, seems like it’s not coming together.’
Top tip: ‘Put down your phone and look at the world. Look closely, then look again.’
