A Civil War in the Olive Garden Parking Lot
Think about where you are, this very moment — and imagine all that has happened there before now.
When I was in college in Tennessee, for example, my neighborhood was nicknamed “The Fort,” because that’s exactly what it was during the Civil War. How weird to think that where soldiers once fired cannons, students today are doing keg stands. And actually, I wouldn’t have been shocked to see Civil War soldiers milling around the neighborhood; re-enactments were — and are — huge in the area.
That interests photographer Gregg Segal. “I travel a lot on assignment for magazines and had been increasingly disturbed by the growing sameness of America,” he writes in an email. “Wherever I traveled, I’d see the same strip malls with the same Olive Gardens and Jamba Juices and Panera Breads, etc., and I wanted to say something about the erasure of the past and the homogenization of the landscape.”
More here: npr.org
Just go and look at the pictures, even if you don’t read the article.
#5, #9, #12, & #13 especially.