This Legend Took His Senior Portraits At Taco Bell

Face it, high school senior portraits are usually pretty lame. Most of us slog through the tradition to appease our parents and loved ones, who desperately yearn for a token of our burgeoning adulthood in the form of a photo of us awkwardly posed against a fence in an empty field, or on a faux rock wall in some nondescript neverland. Then there are the students who buck tradition and create something truly original -- like this kid who opted to suit up in a tux and have a photographer shoot him in one of his favorite local haunts: Taco Bell. 

17-year-old high school senior Andrew McBurnie of Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School in Bradley, Illinois chose to commemorate the end of his high school career in a familiar hangout, posed doing something he's intimately familiar with: housing crunchy tacos, nachos, and a Mountain Dew Baja Blast Freeze. In an interview with his local paper, The Daily Journal, McBurnie copped to doing it just for laughs, "Taco Bell has always been a place me and my friends would go throughout high school," he said. "And people who know me know how much I love being there, so I knew getting some photos done would make some people laugh. It ended up going way farther than I had planned." 

The photos actually garnered enough attention online that Taco Bell noticed, and Tweeted the photo set from its official account, declaring McBurnie "Taco Bell's next top model."

This isn't actually the first senior portrait session to take place in a fast food joint teeming with Gorditas and Crunchwrap Supremes. In 2015, a high school student in St. Louis did something similar. However, McBurnie's photographer, Wesley Taylor, made a point to make this Taco Bell series a bit different. As he told the website The Daily Meal, "I'd heard that Taco Bell senior pictures had been done before, but I wanted to put my own spin on them — so we went for a blown-out, teen fashion magazine aesthetic, and Andrew nailed it. I couldn't be happier with how they turned out."

Here's to the dreamers.

h/tThe Daily Meal

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Joe McGauley is a senior writer for Thrillist. Follow him @jwmcgauley.