Micah Cash: Waffle House Vistas

A Photographers Place
5100 Lacy Avenue
Raleigh North Carolina
Friday, October 2, 2026
5:00 PM - 9:00 PM

“There was a time in my life when the bright yellow Waffle House sign sang out to me, called me off the highway, lured me out of my ’82 Sentra. I was younger then, and I remember sitting in a booth and mostly focusing on my food. And so I take great joy, all these years later, in these images. I love the kind of wordly obsessiveness Micah Cash brings to this project: The man visited more than 90 Waffle House restaurants in 11 states, and serves up sly, subtle pictures that lead me to look beyond my plate of scattered, smothered, and covered hash browns and think about politics, economics, anthropology, and architecture.”

— Bill Shapiro, former Editor-in-Chief of LIFE magazine

Calvert City: Photograph: Micah Cash

Waffle House Vistas focuses on the built environment as seen through the windows of Waffle House restaurants from across the southeastern United States. The collected images contemplate the surrounding architecture of habitat and commerce through the lens of a southern cultural icon. These photographs ask viewers to look up from their hash browns and acknowledge the institutions and structures that create real, yet rarely acknowledged boundaries that seem impossible to break through for many of us.

While the photographed locations vary by state, population density, and proximity to the Interstate highway system, the surrounding built environments share commonalities. The images look out from booths and chairs, placing the viewer as a witness to the intertwined narratives of economic stability, transience, and politics.