Susana Raab

Super America

Super-America is a body of work that examines contemporary America’s preference for the marketed moment – for pleasure purveyed. Through the prism of fast-food consumption and leisure time in America I dissect our various cultural influences revealing the absurdity that is inherent in consuming products as a form of self-identification.  My goal in making these photographs is to speak to the emotional dissonance I feel in our present condition, due in part to our obsession with the iconography of advertising.  How have the good times diverted us?  We are unaware of the cost as we literally lay waste to our country.

In the hustle of our lives, we are disoriented, distracted by the siren call of the marketers’ myths.  As a child of American suburbia, I feel a genuine affinity and empathy for the subjects of my photographs.  My affection for them is only mitigated by the sense that something is awry.  The people and landscapes in Super-America reflect our need to participate in popular culture, even as we are subsumed by it. We are lost, blissfully ignorant, wandering through an interminable off-season. The festival is ongoing, but the party is over.