Designer and researcher Nathan Spainhour turns a decade of field photography across South Carolina barbecue restaurants into a collage-based book that treats hand-painted signs, improvised typography and roadside architecture as evidence of cultural memory, not aesthetic curiosity.
South Carolina barbecue is not simply a regional food. “Careers are made by it. Legacies are built on it. Regions are known for it,” Nathan Spainhour writes in the book that grew from his MFA thesis in Graphic Design. “It’s more than a cuisine, it helps to define the culture.” The South Carolina BBQ Project begins from that conviction and uses graphic design as the tool to examine it.
The project started with years of travelling across the state and paying attention to how barbecue spaces communicate visually: hand-painted signs, roadside architecture, menu boards and improvised typography that accumulates over decades of use, repair and adaptation. Rather than treating these elements as charming regional artifacts, Spainhour approaches them as evidence, the visual residue of cultural memory and social change.
“South Carolina has a deep history with the cuisine,” he says, “and the visual culture surrounding it is a lens that reveals a larger story.”
The collage language developed to frame that research was built specifically to mirror the environments being documented. Constructed typographic elements, letterboard letters, chalk, charcoal and hand-made marks, were made in studio and layered with field photography to echo the additive, incremental quality of the spaces themselves. Each composition was assembled to feel like it had accumulated over time, as the restaurants themselves do through years of use. The collages are not standalone artworks but a visual methodology, a way of holding the documentary material in a form that reflects its subject.
The project began as six separate publications with supplemental materials, a structure that mirrored the layered environments of the restaurants it documented. The forthcoming single-volume edition, published by Good Printed Things, brings documentary photography, historical research, interviews and constructed visual work into one unified printed artifact. The book carries its research into wider distribution while preserving the material and visual integrity of the original thesis.
“It may seem like a simple plate of food,” Spainhour writes, “but it carries the weight of memory, pride, and the kind of loyalty that draws lines on a map.”
Nathan Spainhour is a designer and artist based in the Upstate of South Carolina. He is the founder of Spainhour Creative Work, an independent studio focused on research-driven brand systems and print work, and teaches graphic design at the university level.
ARTIST LINKS
bbqproject.com / spainhour.co
@scbbqproject / @spainhour_creative_work
The South Carolina BBQ Project. Published by Good Printed Things. All photography by Nathan Spainhour.
