I have always had a fascination for average things. Things that are not the worst, but aren’t the best either. Things that one person may find horrible and the next one other worldly. Even though I am rather fond of myself I have, in many aspects, considered myself to be fairly average. My grades throughout high school we’re an average 6, played sports and won and lost just about the same amount of times. Far from ugly but not the most gorgeous ever either. My friends and family might reject this classification. They would likely tell me I am wonderful, exceptional, or "uniquely myself”. I don’t see the problem with average. I get excited by that sweet spot in which the “I hate it” and “I love it” collide. There is a simple, grounded confidence in the embracing the middle ground.
When looking at synonyms for the word ‘average’, words such as mediocre and ordinary come up. These are not the same thing and it is important to distinguish between the three. While ordinary means something is just common or expected, and mediocre implies a disappointing lack of effort, average is far more dynamic. It is a mathematical peace treaty. It is the exact point where the person who thinks a movie is a cinematic masterpiece and the person who walked out of the theater meet, shake hands, and agree on a solid 2.5 out of 5 stars. To be average isn’t to be boring; it’s to be the ultimate comprehension. The quiet, underrated tension of the middle. Curated entirely from the Google Maps review platform, this archive strips away the manicured visual aesthetics of modern (digital) food culture. This selection of images is an archive celebrating the average. The beauty of 3-star reviews. The food that didn’t kill you, but that wasn’t the greatest either.
This is an archive I have been working on for about 2 years, always having a feel for these “average” images and their stories, never quite sure what to do with them. Then I went to a presentation in Spui25 last May and listened to Hans Aarsman talk to the crowd about functional photography. The main question he presented throughout his talk was whether functional photography is aesthetic, beautiful and therefore worthy of the spotlight(?). My interpretation of his view and also my own was a definite yes! I was captivated by the subjects he brought up, one of them being a photo series shot by a doctors assistent whom captured with kind of different “pee containers” that people came into the clinic with. From empty peanut butter jars to children’s drinking receptacles, it was an extensive collection of creative, very human, solutions. All images we’re shot in the dim light of one of the doctors office backrooms, perhaps with a smartphone or basic camera. It would be easy to redeem these images to numerous negative terms, since the images we’re not inherently ‘aesthetic’. However, it is exactly that what entails its beauty. The talk furthermore discussed the topic of what exactly belongs in an archive. It was the main inspiration to publish this archival work.
These images in the 3-stars archive are primarily shot in the harsh, accidental realism of a smartphone camera. These images of meals perfectly contain the purgatory of human indifference. "Fine, but they forgot the salt." . All images are un-staged, un-styled, and utterly devoid of pretense. This series is an ode to the middle ground. It is a visual monument to the meals that did exactly what they were supposed to do, no more and no less.
