Photographer Leah Frances has gained recognition for her haunting image of an empty 1950s-style diner in Pennsylvania, captured during the COVID-19 pandemic as part of her ongoing exploration of American nostalgia and social isolation. The photograph, featuring the Very Best hot dog joint in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, showcases the photographer's signature style of documenting vintage American spaces devoid of human presence.
Frances, originally from Alert Bay, British Columbia, Canada, first noticed the American fascination with 1950s aesthetics after moving to Brooklyn in 2005. She observed people building restaurants and bars designed to look like classic diners, complete 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," Frances explained. Growing up on Vancouver Island, she watched old American movies and imagined they represented what the country actually looked like across the water.
However, Frances became increasingly curious about this nostalgic sentiment, recognizing that those supposedly golden times "were not better for most people, only a few." She views this false nostalgia as having become dangerous, particularly with former President Trump's "Make America Great Again" rhetoric. This critical perspective shaped her artistic approach to documenting these spaces.
In 2013, Frances began driving through smaller Pennsylvania towns to photograph places that remained unchanged since the 1950s. She sought out communities where mines had closed or highways had been rerouted, leaving diners frozen in time unlike their constantly renovated New York counterparts. "It feels like the past and the present are somehow taking place at the same time. It's really beautiful," she noted.
Frances launched her Instagram account "American Squares" in 2015, describing it as "more about nostalgia than it is nostalgic." She reflects on how the creators of these prefabricated diners, which "rolled off assembly lines," would be shocked to see them viewed with such reverence today. "They were trying to get to the moon: they were future-oriented people," she observed.
The Very Best diner holds particular significance in Frances' work. She first discovered the establishment around 2016, noting its beautiful Vitrolite storefront and striking typographic signage. Originally opened in 1921, the diner had closed the year before Frances found it, but a local resident took over the business, restored it carefully, and reopened it in September 2019. When Frances photographed it again in 2021, the owner was following social distancing guidelines, resulting in the eerily quiet atmosphere captured in her image.
Frances deliberately includes specific details to establish time and place in her photographs. The image features Hall and Oates on the jukebox, relevant because Daryl Hall is from Pottstown and John Oates grew up in the same county. Additionally, the vintage arcade game Centipede, visible in the shot, was developed by Atari and co-designed by Dona Bailey, one of the few female game programmers in the industry at that time and one of the first arcade games to attract a significant female player base.
This photograph appears in Frances' book "Lunch Poems," where she focused on communal settings and "third spaces" outside of home and work. She emphasizes how society lost these gathering places during the pandemic, causing suffering "in ways we maybe haven't fully acknowledged yet." The Very Best represented exactly this type of beloved community space where people could stop and chat in a super-friendly environment, even employing one waitress who worked there for 44 years.
Despite the diner's reputation for warmth and community, Frances deliberately chose to photograph it empty. She explains that "what photographers leave out of the frame often influences the final meaning as much as what we include." The conspicuous absence of people in her series creates "almost postapocalyptic scenes" that serve as a metaphor for pandemic separation, despair, and political division.
Frances carefully frames her photographs to explore specific themes and communications. For this series, she would wait for crowded spaces to empty or arrive just as businesses were opening or closing. She acknowledges this approach might not always be responsible, as business owners probably don't want their restaurants captured as "melancholic and empty." However, she emphasizes that rather than documenting actual places as they exist in reality, she photographs ideas she hopes others will understand and reflect upon.
The "Lunch Poems" photographs collectively paint an almost postapocalyptic scene, though not all images were created during the pandemic. Frances used the pandemic as a "prism through which I began to look at the finished images," and it significantly shaped her editing process. When viewers look at these pictures, she wants them to ask, "What happened here?" or "What will happen next?"
Frances, who is self-taught and later earned an MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia, draws inspiration from photographers Bruce Wrighton, Birney Imes, and William Eggleston for this series, Wim Wenders for color work, and poet Gerald Stern. She considers her career high point to be the first time the New York Times Magazine published her work, while currently feeling she may be at a low point, having spent years on a new project that "seems like it's not coming together."
Her advice to aspiring photographers is simple but profound: "Put down your phone and look at the world. Look closely, then look again." Through her work, Frances continues to challenge viewers to examine American nostalgia critically while documenting the spaces that define community and connection in contemporary society.
