You Are Here
We were lucky to receive some money to create a booth at The Baltimore Arts Festival. The topic was Roadside Attractions. We decided to photograph a roadside attraction in upstate PA, an entire room full of model trains depicting small town America. Our booth "You Are Here" was decorated with American flags and other red white and blue objects from the party store, and posters advertising our booth were set up in the vicinity, akin to the tacky billboards on highways. We then set up a green screen in our booth, and people were allowed to pick the area that they wanted to be virtually set in- either a war memorial, a church, a gas station, or a general store. They filled out a ticket and then later we uploaded their portraits onto a website where they could enter a number to find themselves set into the placement of their choosing. It looked like they had been put into a time machine, except we put a black circle over their faces. We did this for two reasons. One reason was that we were alluding to how roadside attractions offer a lot but deliver very little. The other was referring to the cultural myth that is small town America, how it is a lost idea that is no longer identifiable or pertinent in the larger scope of American culture.
