Monster Truck

by The Happy Crowd

6x20" • Digital Print $NFS

Within the Happy Crowd My photographs explore one facet of America’s inexorable relationship with the pursuit of happiness, depicting hyper-real environments where many people congregate in order to experience enjoyment. Visiting these types of places has become an American ritual, an experience associated with happy moments and memories. The presence of my camera interrupts these moments, resulting in an image of a peculiar and dramatized environment, one that is at times humorous but always a little unsettling. These images are the result of a brief encounter between the individuals within these places and myself, an exchange created, mediated, and solidified by the camera. I was attracted to people who seemed simultaneously isolated from, yet tragically bound to, the saturated, plastic environment. These adults, teenagers, and children are situated in an environment where experience is commercialized and individuality generalized. They exist within a dichotomy of the prosaic and the spectacular, a tension between desire and delight. Like the individuals in my images, I exchanged an admission fee in order to enter a place conceived and constructed around the idea of providing opportunities for enjoyment. This environment could be considered an exaggerated, fantastical, simulation of a society in which each individual is incessantly encouraged to assume a position Within the Happy Crowd.