Washington, D.C.-based photographer Susana Raab was born the same day McDonald's Big Mac was launched—May 4, 1968—so perhaps it was destiny that she would spend five years consumed by "Consumed," a personal project documenting how fast foods permeate American culture.

Babies in strollers surround a trashcan overflowing with French-fry boxes and Pepsi cups at an Ohio fair. An obese young man on a motorized wheelchair places an order at the drive-thru window of a Taco Bell in Daytona, Florida. And, more subtly, McDonald's ubiquitous golden arches peer over a rooftop as kids play in Nelsonville, Ohio.

The colorful, sometimes gaudy images Raab has made of America's addiction to junk food might easily be read as an indictment of unhealthy consumerism, but she insists she is on a gentler mission.

"My goal is not to mock or blame," Raab says, "but to show through wit and humor the greater tragedy from which we can recover, and for which no single individual is to blame."

After beginning her career as a Capitol Hill photographer, Raab decided in 2003 to do graduate work at Ohio University's School of Visual Communications in order to take a break from news photography and to refine her own vision. "Consumed" and a related project, "Off-Season," which focuses on Florida theme parks that market history as entertainment, both began in grad school. "Both projects," Raab says, "deal with how frenzied we are by marketing and advertising." Raab began working on "Consumed" after reading Eric Schlosser's 2002 bestseller Fast Food Nation and realizing that fast food was a subject she could photograph anywhere she happened to be.

In her artist's statement about "Consumed," Raab writes, "Using medium-format color film to translate the saturated colors and hyper-reality of this industry's advertising conventions, my photographs seek to obliquely answer the question, 'To what extent has the fast-food industry's marketing and nutritional practices affected Americans?' In "Consumed," I see the act of eating as an act of ideology."

Since 2004, Raab has created some 100 digital C-prints in the "Consumed" series shooting with a Mamiya 7 Rangefinder. Her work has been supported by the White House News Photographers' Association and the Puffin Foundation. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History is in the process of acquiring her photographs from several of Raab's bodies of work.

Shannon Perich, an associate curator who works with the National Museum of American History's Photographic History Collection, says she values the fact that Raab's photographs "are not judgmental and preachy."

Perich sees color as critical to Raab's success in "Consumed." "By working in color," Perich says, "she heightens the point of consumerism by allowing the work of package designers and advertisers to be seen in all its glory, as well as connecting the viewer to the contemporary reality of the scene or moment in the photograph."

The show "Consumed" will be exhibited in July 2009 at the Dean Jensen Gallery in Milwaukee. And, while Raab says she is currently looking for a book publisher, she hopes the junk food nation she has so colorfully documented will eventually become history.

"We are all victims of what they tell us we want," says Raab of the mass marketing of America's consumer culture. "I'm hoping all of this will be obsolete in 50 years."