Newsletter #195 - The Good Old Days
A Pizza Hut and a whole lot of tears
Last week, I photographed a Pizza Hut in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania for the New York Times.
The look, the smell, the taste. It reminded me of being a kid in the 90s.
No, seriously, it did. My parents used to take my brother and me to a Pizza Hut that looked exactly like this in Huntington, NY.
There is something about 90s nostalgia that’s really hitting right now.
It's probably because most people who grew up in that era are having a midlife crisis, but it probably also has something to do with enshittification and how corporations, in their pursuit of infinite profit, have turned everything we once loved into unremarkable products to be quickly consumed and discarded. We long for the days when things seemed like they had real meaning and value.
Anyway. Pizza Hut!
The pictures I made on February 25 and 28 ran as the cover of the Food Section on March 4, 2026.
Steven Kurutz's story, "Pizza Huts Remodel To Unlock A Portal To the Past," is about why these old school dine-in Pizza Huts never really disappeared, and why so many of us keep finding our way back.
There’s something about your work existing in print, in the world, that just makes it feel real. Physical evidence that something happened.
This feeling is why I put together twenty-plus years of published work, gathered in one place at tears.noahkalina.com.
If you don’t know, a tear sheet is a page pulled from a published magazine, newspaper, book, or catalog that shows where a creative’s work appeared. Photographers and other visual artists collect them as proof of published work.
I’ve collected nearly 200 of mine, spanning May 2004 to the current day. Magazine editorials, book inclusions, ad campaigns, interviews, album artwork. It’s not everything, but it’s what I could find.
I know, Tears might seem like a weird name for this.
But "Tears" stuck because it was short, it was the most accurate, and I like that you might read it as crying.
Sometimes when I look back, I want to cry.
If you’re a photographer, designer, art director, or someone who hires them, this might be worth a look. There’s something to seeing how photography and design work together on the page, how type and layout shape the way an image lands.
Let me know what you think!
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Damn, I feel this. Thanks, Noah.
Good stuff. I’m all about nostalgia!