- My name is Leah Frances, and I'm a photographer.

(inspiring chiming music) (camera clicking) I was born on Cormorant Island in British Columbia in a little village called Alert Bay.

And from there when I was about two, my parents moved me to Victoria, British Columbia which is on the end of Vancouver Island.

Victoria is beneath the natural border with the United States and I think that may be one reason why I became so interested in American culture and the way that America looks.

You can get cell phone reception from the end of the street like from Washington State from where I grew up.

So I grew up very close to America yet in a different place.

(upbeat happy music) In university, I did study linguistics and throughout school, it actually took me about six years to get my undergraduate degree because I moved out of my house at 17 and I was supporting myself as a waitress.

And I think, you know, it's a pretty obvious leap to make but I think, you know, part of my interest in third spaces, gathering spaces, diners, restaurants and bars, is because I worked in them for so long.

(inspiring piano music) I moved to Brooklyn, New York in 2005 and I used to walk in my neighborhood and I was seeing a lot of like changing, gentrification, a lot of building and one thing that I noticed was a lot of bars and restaurants being built to look as though they were from a particular era.

There were like southern restaurants made to look like they were in a fifties gas station.

There were dive bars made to look like they were in a 1960s basement.

And I really became super curious about what was behind that.

And as a Canadian, I wasn't super familiar with that.

Like I don't think that we have a certain era that we look back upon as perhaps when we were the greatest or there's no sort of period we look back upon with desire.

(slow synth music) The first diner that I visited in the United States is this diner right here, the Dutch Kitchen Diner.

So my husband and I were on a road trip and we drove up to Centralia, which is nearby and we stopped off in here and I had never seen anything like it.

He wanted to go through to the restaurant part but I was like, what is this little, like train cart looking thing at the front?

And I was, you know, really taken with it.

So this is a manufactured diner, built in a factory and assembled on site, which I find really interesting because I can't imagine this thing rolling off a factory, being assembled here.

It feels in some way like that gives it a fresh start.

And then what I'm really interested in is like the human element.

How does this diner then become personalized?

Like what decisions do the owners make?

And little things like, you know, the elbow rubs on the table, under the bar, on the bar.

The little things over time that personalize and humanize the diner, I think are fascinating given that they're starting out in a factory.

Photographing these quintessentially American spaces but photographing them empty, for me in this period of time, began to be a way to speak about I think the division that we have in our country.

So, you know, these are places that we would gather yet we were not really in agreement.

Many of us are not in agreement right now.

So, just I was, I think, began to use that photograph as a metaphor and it sort of became a theme of my most recent book and show.

(slow synth music) This glowing square that I'm looking at right now is just an, is really an otherworldly experience like looking through this.

I get almost a euphoric feeling when I'm making a photograph or maybe it's like a really desolate feeling.

Whatever feeling it is that I'm having when I'm making the photograph, I'm looking for ways that I can somehow communicate that feeling.

When you have a scene that I've photographed in a diner and maybe there's like, you know, this left water glass on the table, you know, one might ask oneself, so what happened here or what is happening here, or what could happen here?

And I think that, I hope, that my photographs leave space for what could happen here.

That within that frame, there is room for us to imagine sort of a better future if one will, a time when people will gather again, a time where we'll somehow fix what seems to be broken right now.

So I think with those sort of really vast spaces that you find in my photographs, it, you know, leaves room for the imagination to create something maybe positive is my hope.

(dreamy synth music) (camera clicking) (camera clicking) (camera clicking) (camera clicking)