The Art of the Airways (review)

As cultural geography looks more and more into how images can be used to construct place, we are offered an intriguing and colorful discussion into the role of art in the creation of tourist spaces. Geza Szurovy's extremely informative book collects airline travel posters from the inception of the first airline in 1914 to the close of the 20^th century, places them onto high-quality, large-format pages, and then annotates each selection with an insightful note that concisely contextualizes each poster. I stress the high production values because the aesthetic quality of Szurovy's selections require the use of a larger format and glossy paper to properly convey the inherent beauty of these wonderful works of art. While their primary function was certainly as an advertisement for a particular airline, one cannot overlook their value as a cultural production, a representation open to many interpretations (see Craine and Aitken 2003; and Mitchell 2000 for a more in-depth explanation of visual geographies, especially images as cultural representations). Thus, for geographers, especially critical geographers, Szurovy's book offers a fascinating way to explore a vast range of topics, from imperialism and neocolonialism to the Western fetishization of the exotic to any number of economic, social, and cultural issues relating to critical cultural geography or anthropology. We are exposed to the world as the airlines and their owners (often governments themselves) wanted us to see it; the posters serve to create our mental map of the world, naturalizing its beauty in such a way that our desire to experience those destinations becomes concrete. The burgeoning airline industry takes this desire and creates a new tourist economy. Szurovy then follows these travelers, first across Tampa Bay in 1914, then from London to Paris, down to Casablanca, across the United States, to South America, to India (on Imperial Airways no less), and outward across Asia to French Indochina, and across the oceans to remote islands such as Pago Pago. Any reader will appreciate these posters and, I suspect, geographers will enjoy the book on many different levels.

Szurovy has organized the four chapters of his book in chronological fashion, starting with the inception of the first airline and ending, on the next-to-last page, with a TWA poster of the pre-9/11 New York skyline at dusk accompanied by a haunting caption: "This was one of TWA's last posters, an unwitting memorial now to a fine American airline and a tragedy that reaches far beyond America." It is hard to ignore the deep irony located within this particular poster—that the very commodity advertised becomes an instrument of its own destruction—and the book is full of these wonderful moments where time and space are compressed and juxtaposed in an effort to bring the places of the world closer for everyone.

Chapter One, "Fur Coats and Foot Warmers," begins in 1922. Freya Stark is dressed in a fur-lined leather helmet, fleece-lined flying boots, and a full-length sheepskin coat; is given gloves and a pair of flying goggles, and is then rather unceremoniously loaded into the open cockpit of a Handley Page 0/400 and flown from London's Croydon Airport to Le Bourget outside Paris—in the remarkable time of 2 hours. While not the first official airline route, a distinction that goes to the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airport Line in 1914 (and Zeppelins had ferried passengers in pre-World War I Germany), it was definitely the most glamorous of its time and set the stage for the emerging airline industries and their revised WWI bombers to become the natural successors to train travel. With the added feature of being able to travel over expanses of water previously accessible only by much-slower ship traffic, airlines were poised to encircle the globe. Szurovy's selection of posters highlights these first tentative steps: the plane itself is most often the centerpiece of the design at this point in time (but this is not always so: one is struck in the following chapters by the number of posters where the...