Micah Cash is a conceptual landscape photographer. He’s interested in the interaction between landscapes and architecture, and how the two prompt conversations and disruptions to social, political and economic structures.
If that sounds a little conceptual, his new book makes those concepts feel immediate — so immediate, in fact, that you can practically taste them. The book is called "Waffle House Vistas," and it’s a series of images taken through the windows of Waffle House restaurants across the southern U.S.
Cash joined The Show to talk about the project and how the book is about the stories Waffle House tells about life outside and inside the walls of the restaurant.
Full conversation
MICAH CASH: In many ways, this book started about a year or two prior to making the photographs because I was looking for a way to discuss sort of this American style of poverty that many of us in the country feel where we are one or two paychecks away from financial ruin. And also this idea that from what I've witnessed in my life, is that people in America work very hard, and yet it is so hard to get ahead.
And then one day I was on the road coming from some book signings and from making photographs, and I stopped at a Waffle House, and I looked out the window and I thought to myself, “Oh, look at the surrounding architecture and landscape. There are certain businesses like Dollar Generals or payday loan establishments,” and I thought to myself, “That's interesting. It certainly plays upon a stereotype of a Waffle House-type person.”
SAM DINGMAN: Hmm. So the thought was, “I've stopped at a Waffle House, presumably because it's an affordable place to eat and ubiquitous,” and you were noticing kind of for the first time, “Oh, it's not just that when I stop at a Waffle House, there's food here that's an affordable option. It's also been placed in an environment of other businesses that are geared towards people who might not have that much money to spend on the bare necessities.”
CASH: That's correct. And so that that stereotype was sort of an entry point. And after visiting 125 Waffle Houses in 11 states, it's a stereotype that's not true. But that was kind of one of the hooks that got me thinking about this project. And when I'm in a space like that artistically, I wanna ask those hard questions.
DINGMAN: Yeah. This stereotype of a person who eats at a Waffle House, how would you have defined that before you started this project, and, and were you somebody who had a habit of eating at Waffle Houses?
CASH: Yes, absolutely. I think Waffle House has always been one of my favorite road foods, particularly if I need to get up and start driving early in the morning. When I was in high school and college, of course, we have a different relationship with it, where it's a place you can hang out with your friends, particularly late at night, maybe coming home from a concert back when I was able to stay up that late.
And the people that you eat with on the inside, and the people who work on the inside of that establishment for the most part are just salt of the earth people, people that are working very hard for their careers and for their families and their hopes and their dreams. And that is something we all have in common.
And what I found is that in those spaces, everybody's sort of keeping to themselves. But if you open up a conversation with somebody else, that base necessity of saying, “I'm at this Waffle House, you're at this Waffle House, therefore, we have that in common.” And so, I would talk to people that I really had nothing in common with outside of what brought us there.
DINGMAN: So talk a little bit about your process in doing this. How did you pick the locations that you decided to go to and when you went into these Waffle Houses, what did you do? Like, did they know you were coming? Did you have to introduce yourself and say why you were there?
CASH: No, no. It's a Waffle House, Sam. You just walk in and sit down and you know, I could bring my gear in, and most of the time I could make my photographs and no one would bother me.
I wanted to visit stores located in high poverty, median poverty, and low poverty counties in each state, just to see, is there a difference? And in all honesty, you really can't tell the difference.
I had this set of rules, and I would go into a Waffle House, I would find a place to sit, wherever was open. And I would have some type of experience. In the mornings I would have a full breakfast. In the afternoons I would just have toast and maybe a side of coffee, and later in the afternoons, just coffee. But I would always order something, so I would have that exchange with the server
And I would look out and make photographs from wherever I was seated. And that was the rule. I wouldn't really move around the restaurant all that often. And sometimes I would go in and I would make bad photographs, and I would just go to the next Waffle House. Occasionally someone would ask me, “Why are you photographing the parking lot?” And that was usually a nice segue into having and sometimes multiple hour conversations with somebody.
DINGMAN: Tell me about one of those conversations that really sticks in your memory.
CASH: There was one individual in Richmond who had escaped a negative family situation in the Midwest. He didn't want to talk about it, but he sort of described his journey of waking up one day and saying, “I have to get out,” and he got in his car and he just drove south and ended up in Richmond. And he couldn't articulate why he ended up in Richmond, that's just where he was and he said, “This is good enough,” and “Let me go find a job.” And so he was sort of re-establishing his new life.
And incredibly positive, anybody who has dealt with a family or, you know, a work or some type of social situation, and you need to escape it, knows that it can very easily go the other way. And so he was so full of optimism that he had made the right decision, and this was the first chapter of his new life, and that was beautiful.
And another one was in Calvert City, Kentucky, which is the restaurant where I made the key image of the project. And this guy, he was maybe 18, 19 and had graduated high school, had no other plans, and he was just working at the Waffle House to save up to buy a ring for his girlfriend and propose to her. And he had already kind of made some plans to get some land and apprentice under a farmer in western Kentucky.
And that was his plan: Working at the Waffle House, I'm gonna buy a ring, gonna get married, I'm gonna become a farmer. And he was so insistent that that's how the world was gonna work. I loved that as somebody who's older that knows that life throws curveballs at you all the time and that the journey is not quite linear. I just, I loved — and I used to be a college professor, and so you would see that a lot from people of that age. But he was just determined to make it happen.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Talk a little bit though about this idea that it was very much for you conceptually about what was outside the Waffle House as much as what was in it. After all, you know, we've been talking a lot about the personalities of people inside a Waffle House, but the book is called “Waffle House Vistas,” and the images are very much about the setting of the Waffle House trip. So what was it that you took away from this exposure to, I think you said like 125 of these settings.
CASH: I think I took many things away. One I took away is that conceptual art can be accessible. It can be made for everyone if you give them a big enough door to enter into that space. And I was shocked, like I said earlier, the number of people that wanted to have these conversations with me, and I think that's because I made this conceptual body of work to let people in, not to keep people out.
