Photography & Frame; Annotated Visual Essay

I chose McDonald’s to pay homage to Ed Ruschas series of “Twentysix Gasoline Stations”(1962). Ruscha looked at this series as though As a society this food chain is apart of our everyday lives and I tried to capture these buildings in a seemingly banal way that holds the perspective of an everyday user/viewer. Just as in Ruschas photographs where the series is “a record of anti-landmarks or poor monuments along the route home”(Iversen, 2009, p.840).

GREEN: The green highlighting shows the negative spaces in both Ruschas photography as well as mine. The use of negative space allows for a a point of view perspective as if someone was just walking or driving across the street and saw these gas stations.

BLUE: All of Ruschas images were taken at eye level which results in the main focus of the photograph being the buildings, this technique of geometrical repetition heightens Ruschas view of taking an ordinary everyday landmark and making it the centre (quite literally) the focus.

ORANGE: Rushca didn’t necessarily view his photographs as banal but “neutral” which can be seen in the tonal range in his series (Iversen, 2009, p. 844).He also sticks to a black and white tonal range scale, this additionally adds to a bland and boring view of Ruschas images. The photographs used the contrast in colours additionally to draw out the main focus of his images.

PINK: the pink highlight is to represent the framing of the photographs, again the use of negative space and repetition gives a banal point of view to the series as each photo has an extremely similar layout. Ruscha has specifically done the layout for the photos in this way to further accentuate the spontaneous yet ordinary view of the world around us.

YELLOW: the last photographs from both Ruscha and myself utilise the overexposed and blurry images, the use of this technique gives the viewer a sense of urgency and momentum. The blur encapsulates the boring feel to the image as it feels as if Ruscha didn’t even slow down or stop to capture the gas stations. In my photographs I tried to recreate that feeling by having the images overexposed and lightly blurred to give that banal and ordinary feel to the images.