Tammy Mercure started her project “Big Rock Candy Mountain” in 2007. For the project, Mercure photographed tourist towns that accompany the natural beauty of The Great Smoky Mountains. The most notable of the towns are Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg in Tennessee and Cherokee in North Carolina. The pure spectacle of the towns brimming with shopping, all-you-can-eat buffets, and pure entertainment, stop some visitors from even seeing the nature up close and unmediated.
Mercure’s images enlarges the absurdities of these theme park towns with a beautiful natural landscape as a backdrop. Bright, colourful, and sometimes uncomfortable to look at Mercure’s images of the “Big Rock Candy Mountain” presents us an insight to the American fascination with artificial spectacle.
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