Kate Medley is the author of the new book Thank You Please Come Again: How Gas Stations Feed & Fuel the American South. A photojournalist, she lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Q: What inspired you to create Thank You Please Come Again?
A: In my work as a photojournalist, I have spent the last 20 years traveling around the South exploring rural communities and covering news.
As part of that, it has become my habit and a tool of exploration to stop at gas stations along the way. When the lunch cravings set in and the only options are McDonald’s or the local gas station, I’ll choose the latter every time.
What hidden gems will I find on the menu, who’s cooking behind the grill, what language are people speaking as they wait, what’s front and center on the community bulletin board? As a bonus, maybe the food will be delicious – it often is – but regardless, look at all the insight about this place I have gained by stopping.
Q: How did you see the photographs and the text working together in the book? Did you focus on one first before turning to the other?
A: As a photojournalist, I consider myself to be a journalist first and a photographer second. When I go out into the world, my goal is to communicate a narrative to a wider audience. Often, my go-to tool for doing so is photography. And Thank You Please Come Again is first and foremost a body of photography work.
That said, I believe the images here are elevated and expanded by the contribution of Kiese Laymon’s incredible foreword (which came later in the making of the book). Laymon has an incredible ability to evoke a sensory experience through words.
In his foreword, for example, I smell the dining room of the Jr. Food Mart gas station. I hear the voices of the workers. I taste the fried chicken. My hope is that the combination of Laymon’s essay and these images will leave a reader feeling fully transported to the Deep South, knee deep in the cultural milieu of these spaces.
A: Absolutely! The rare democratic nature of these spaces continues to inspire my interest in the topic. Our politics may be polarized, our economics stratified, our neighborhoods segregated, and our rhetoric strained, but still nearly everyone regularly passes through these same commercial spaces.
We fill up the tank. We relieve our bladders. We grab a cold one on the way home from work. We take advantage of Friday night’s “prime rib special.” We hold the door for one another. We rub elbows as we pass the ketchup.
In an increasingly atomized world of mediated interactions, we have fewer and fewer communal spaces that unite us. I believe this is something to celebrate!
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope readers will gain greater appreciation for the lifeline that these businesses and workers provide in our communities.
I hope readers will look at the images of Betty Campbell, for instance, who has been cooking her family’s soul food recipes in Indianola, Mississippi, for decades and see the layered histories of this place, the hard work, the joy, the survival.
Similarly, I hope readers will take in the images of Peter Nguyen’s banh mi restaurant at a Texaco station outside of New Orleans and Bator Cisse’s Senegalese restaurant at a Circle K in Greensboro, North Carolina, and see the ways in which this region is growing and changing and prospering. These spaces and these people give me hope.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: In addition to moving this book out into the world, I work as a photojournalist covering national news across the South. With a big election coming up later this year, and all the tentacles of news that come with it, I am deep in the throes of that coverage already.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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