‘The Very Best was a beautiful place to stop and chat. One waitress had been there for 44 years. I photographed it empty as a metaphor for people having been kept apart by the pandemic’
W
hen 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.
