Photography

Ongoing.

Love Letter to Super 88, December 2022

Photo series exploring relationships between memory, youth, the mundane, and food.
Each print 8x10 in. 35mm shot on a Minolta X-370.

Love Letter to Super 88 explores the relationships between memory, youth, the mundane, and food. Boston’s Super 88 Market holds a special place in my heat as it was once an almost weekly destination during my grade school years. Trips to the store became less and less frequent as I grew older; however, my love and appreciation for food only grew and developed into a love for cooking. After a year of living independently in a city far away, I returned to Boston and found myself walking through the dimly lit food court and aisles of the market with a nostalgic longing for my childhood and a home-cooked meal. Super 88 is a time capsule of my youth and a yearning for familiarity and domestic routine.

The series contains eight portraits of fresh produce, meat, and shopping carts found in the market that try to capture the essence and experience of Super 88. Each subject fills the frame, mimicking how one might discover items piled up and spilling out of bins at the store. Each photograph also provides a more detailed examination of the subject’s appearance and attributes, an experience that does not happen often while shopping for food. Details like these, along with the open bins of fresh produce, live seafood, and pockets of sunlight captured in this series are the quiet moments of Super 88 that make it such a classic and special place.

杭州, April 2019