(top) Families, Children, Waiter, New Highway Restaurant, Jersey City, NJ; (bottom) General Motors Factory, Highland Park, MI

Dan Graham began using photography in the mid-1960s as a means to critique the advance industrial society of post-war America. By juxtaposing the image of a highway restaurant to a General Motors factory, Graham seeks to observe the congruent relationship between automobile manufacturing and the mass production of fast food. The diagonal line that traverses the lower image–the blurry segment of a chain-link fence–is perhaps a metaphor through which we, as viewers, may distance ourselves from the narratives of consumption suggested by these apparently banal photographs.