In the mid-thirties, photographer Berenice Abbott and her friend Elizabeth McCausland planned a trip to visit all forty-eight states and to produce a book which, in McCausland’s words, “could be the great democratic book, the great book for masses of people conditioned by reading newspapers and tabloids.” They never found the funding and the trip never happened. But their work and their ideal is being carried on in the work of photographers like Leah Frances. Frances’ work focuses on shared spaces — diners and bars and churches and ice cream stands — places we gather to eat, drink, pray, and talk to one another. Places we communicate in real life, outside of the modern-day tabloids that are internet chatrooms and comments sections. She finds these spaces in their off times, before shifts or after shifts or between shifts. Or their after times — long after people talked and laughed and lived there, when they are boarded up, defunct. There’s a hanging silence in the spaces, a grace in the light that catches in iconic chrome and Naugahyde and neon. These empty places are an expression of our shared loneliness, but they also radiate with a ragged sort of hope. When we share stories over lunch, when we sit and actually speak with one another, when we serve one another and clean up after one another, we realize how much else we share — every foolish wonderful needy kind despairing hopeful thing that makes us human. We see this in Frances’ photographs, layer upon layer upon layer of it. She captures the heavy warmth of nostalgia, both personal and national, and all the ways it sustains us and holds us back. She finds the poetry in it all. -Magpies

“It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.”

—William Carlos Williams

“The photographs in Lunch Poems highlight “third spaces”: communal settings outside of home and work such as taverns, church picnics, diners, restaurants, and movie theaters — sites where we might gather, if we could agree. Actively using photography to explore the residue of time and human effort, I create portraits of place, mindful of the individuals who have been there before and may be there again. Imaginary one-to-one conversations with these ghosts, so to speak, allow me to invest in the possibility that within this divided nation, we might, one day, understand and respect each other. Harnessing light to grasp at moments of joy in complicated environments, with these images I hope to forge an opening for deep looking and the exploration of multiple layers of meaning, an encounter with complex histories rather than one-dimensional, familiar tropes.” – Leah Frances

See a beautiful 5-minute PBS “Short Takes” doc on Lunch Poems here.

“Lunch Poems” (now sold out) debuted as a book in October 2022. Esquire named it a “Favorite Photo Book of Fall 2022.”

LEAH FRANCES is a photographer born in Alert Bay, Canada, now based in Easton, Pennsylvania. Her work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, T Magazine, Lenscratch, the Carnegie Museum of Art’s online journal, Storyboard, and more and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She holds an MFA from The Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia. You can see more of her work at leah-frances.com or on Instagram at @americansquares.