ENJOY house (2018-2019) documents the rise and proliferation of made-for-Instagram selfie factories throughout New York and Los Angeles. The made-for-Instagram selfie factory hybridizes museums, amusement parks, and shopping outlets into large-scale photo opportunities that provide visitors with readymade fantasies selling the idea of experience. Set designers employ a palette that uptakes the language of commercial femininity, embellishing warehouses with baby pink backdrops and decorative props such as fake flowers, confetti, glittering streamers, and plastic flamingos. These spaces act as film sets devoid of narrative, where nothing necessarily happens outside of the picture-taking event.

In the world of made-for-Instagram selfie factories, I am a member of the target market audience: a female urbanite and Instagram user in her early twenties. Throughout the course of one year, I photographed over sixty made-for-Instagram selfie factories in New York and Los Angeles such as Rosé Mansion, BeautyCon Pop, American Dream, Fairy Island, Museum of Sweets and Selfies, Happy-Go- Lucky, Fa La Land, among many more.

This series presents such forms of escapist amusement as hostile and uninhabitable environments. Subjects and spaces are produced in the pursuit of ideals, where sites for entertainment are fashioned by their shortcomings. Through the negation of color, this series focuses on how the construction of fantasy inevitably entails its own failure.

An absence emerges from the cumulation of disparate places and their visitors, all of whom become actors participating in the same theater. This theater consists of costumed spaces that take on the appearance of purgatories rather than playgrounds. By photographing moments of authenticity at the height of artifice, I look at the ways people manufacture themselves to conform to the props that surround and confine them. The discovery in each picture lies in the decontextualization of activity, where nonperformances take center stage and expectations of glamour evacuate in the physicalization of desire. The formal simplicity of greyscale attests to this symbolic power, emphasizing a generation’s inheritance of a modern empty experience.