National Egg Day and a Fast Food Icon
Eggs may be one of the most photographed foods in the world.
They show up in breakfast advertisements, restaurant menus, grocery stores, cooking videos, and enough stock photographs to fill the internet several times over. Yet somehow they remain one of the most recognizable ingredients ever put on a plate.
For National Egg Day, I decided to go in a slightly different direction.
Rather than photograph eggs by themselves, I turned to one of the sandwiches that helped make them a fast-food staple. The McDonald’s Egg McMuffin has been around for more than fifty years and is still one of the most recognizable breakfast sandwiches ever created.
This photograph features a stack of Egg McMuffins from my FOOD FROM BAG TO BACKGROUND series. No stylists. No carefully arranged garnish. No attempt to make them look like advertising. Just the sandwiches as they arrived, isolated against black and given the chance to stand on their own.
What interested me was the repetition. The English muffins, the eggs, the Canadian bacon, and the slices of cheese create a pattern that almost becomes architectural when several are stacked together. Something most people grab through a drive-thru window suddenly becomes a study of shapes, textures, and layers.
The Egg McMuffin wasn’t the first breakfast sandwich, but it helped define what a fast-food breakfast could be. Decades later, it remains a familiar part of morning routines across the country.
Not bad for something built around a simple egg.
You can see more from my FOOD FROM BAG TO BACKGROUND series, along with aviation photography, collections, and other projects, at https://www.secondfocus.com Chances are you’ll find something familiar that looks a little different when removed from its usual surroundings.
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