For the past two years I have been traveling the upper Midwest, photographing theme parks, museums, fairs and all manner of tourist attractions. I am interested in how these attractions translate and reflect back to us a popularly acceptable version of our culture. This can be in a museum context with its studious cultural interpretations, or in an area of play with its popular cultural themes. Either way, we are dealing with a cultural looking glass that proscribes and reinforces notions of who we are and where we have come from. One of the aims of this project is to capture this prefab vision of ourselves as it is interwoven into these venues. From an architectural standpoint, the forms, structures, colors and textures used to create these artificial realities can be quite interesting and often amusing. This often creates an element of surrealism that contrasts with our normal tenets of form and function. On one level, this project is a look at the collision of these fantasy worlds with banal everyday reality and the interesting juxtapositions that result. The amusement and relaxation industry offers a promise of escape from the stressors of the everyday world, if even only momentarily. The fact that this need to escape is to places that are predictable and controlled creates an interesting dichotomy. My photographs are a look at the architecture, site planning and messaging at these places with an eye to exploring this dichotomy.