This sign was outside a gas station. The choice being offered was between regular and high-octane fuel.
As an American, the first image conjured up to me by the word “magnum” is Dirty Harry’s powerful .44 revolver that can ‘blow your head clean off.’ Magnum is also the name of a prestigious association of photographers, named after a large bottle of champagne. One might even think of the brilliant marketer who came up with the idea of selling ‘magnum’ sized condoms for men who just can’t fit into a standard size. Considering that a normal condom can fit over a man’s head, I’d imagine this becomes traumatizing for all involved. In any case, MAGNUM means more for the sake of… well… more.
Love it or hate it, capitalism doesn’t just nurture the sense that whatever we have just isn’t good enough, it depends on it. We accept its gifts, the chocolate chip cookies and the V-8 engines and the Teutonic cameras… all at the price of eternal self-doubt (is my car boss enough? would a sharper lens make me a better photographer? why am I not eating a chocolate chip cookie right now?). And as demonstrated by the porn magazine I saw in my youth that solicited subscriptions with the usual name/address boxes superimposed over a closeup of a woman’s crotch and ‘do you have what it takes to fill this?’ in big letters, capitalism has no qualms about hitting below the belt.
This is, of course, yesterday’s doughnut for most women, who’ve been told that their worth and their beauty are one and the same since… well… since pretty much forever. In fact, many years after I took this photo a friend observed that the film Fight Club is about men chafing under a kind of domestication that women have always had to accept. And in 2023, around the world it seems, this need to ‘reclaim’ an idealized masculinity ultimately gets expressed through violence.
Travel makes the strange into the familiar and, ideally, makes the familiar strange. Things that have always just passed as background noise suddenly seem odd in another context. Trying to understand why things abroad are done the way they are inevitably leads to asking the same questions about wh you came from, and more than souvenirs or photographs, THIS is what you take home with you.