The idea surfaced while on a trip to Morocco during Ramadan, explains New York City-based photographer Gary He: The local McDonald’s was serving an iftar kit that included dates, chebakia (a honey-covered pastry), a yogurt-milk beverage, and harira soup, all enclosed in a special box. “When I went to research the meal, I found nothing online, which got me thinking: How crazy is it that nobody was cataloguing these cultural accommodations that the largest restaurant in the world was making?” He decided he was the photographer to do it. Without support from McDonald’s, He began documenting the restaurants and their custom menu items around the world, ultimately resulting in a photobook, “McAtlas.”
To capture the photos, He traveled to 55 countries, selecting which restaurants to visit by researching online menus and checking out the restaurant sites on Google Maps. His favorite? A McDonald’s in Lindvallen, Switzerland, located on the side of a mountain, that had a ski-through order window. He arrived at the perfect time—after a huge snowfall—and made photos using his drone (before diving into some McNuggets with truffle mayonnaise).
Traveling extensively taught him how to pack camera gear efficiently and how to set up a makeshift studio in a hotel room to photograph menu items. Instead of rolls of paper, he packed 8.5x11-inch colored construction paper in various hues. He used a gridded Profoto A2 on a light stand on a table or shelf far away from the subject as a main light, and a 12x18-inch v-flat card as a bounce. He photographed with a Canon EOS R5 and a 24-105mm f/4 lens. “Everything fit into a backpack so I would never be forced to check it, no matter how small the plane,” he says.
“When people think about McDonald’s, they think about the consistency and the standardization,” he says. But He’s travels showed him that “on the ground, that really isn’t the case.” The restaurant chain “has made so many local accommodations that in some places it would barely be recognizable if the packaging didn’t have the Golden Arches on it.”
Amanda Arnold is a senior editor.
