Pastoral and Monumental: Dams, Postcards, and the American Landscape

Chapter Eight: Snapshot Culture

PASTORAL AND MONUMENTAL 280 At midcentury picture postcards were entrenched as essential components of American culture, but their status had changed dramatically since the golden age of 1905–1915. Postcard collectors and postcard clubs survived, but more as a hobbyist niche and not as a broad-based movement engaging people across the sociocultural landscape. The diversity of local views was in decline, and, from the perspective of the renowned photographer Walker Evans, the graphic quality of postcards had also eroded since the golden age. In an essay published in Fortune in 1948, Evans waxed nostalgic about how “main street” views—a genre that he had collected for many years—were in decline.1 But it wasn’t just changes in postcards and the views they recorded that Evans lamented, it also involved the changing character of life in the postwar America. Postcards now largely served as a means of quick communication and as a marker of travels made and prominent places seen. Views of massive, monumental dams like Hoover and Shasta and Norris continued to proliferate in the late 1940s and 1950s, but, carrying on a trend from the New Deal era, small-scale dams attracted scant attention from postcard manufacturers. Local drugstores were still festooned with racks of cards but, in contrast to the golden age, the variety of views was severely diminished. “Comic cards” or landscape scenes tied to no particular town were widely distributed, a consequence of mass production and the reduced manufacturing costs that such generic views entailed. The Chapter Eight snapshot culture snapshot culture 281 Snapshot culture circa 1925. A group visits the La Grange Dam in the foothills near Modesto, California. Completed in the mid-1890s, this masonry overflow dam diverts water from the lower Toulumne River for the Turlock and Modesto Irrigation Districts. Camping astride the reservoir above the Littlerock Dam in northern Los Angeles County, circa 1930. This candid snapshot was probably taken in the late fall or early winter, after the reservoir had been drawn down by the demands of pear farmers served by the Littlerock Creek and Palmdale Irrigation Districts. snapshot culture 282 (Above) Before they were demolished with explosives in May 1929, the remains of the St. Francis Dam became a tourist destination for day trippers out of Los Angeles, many armed with a camera. (Left) An intriguing inscription on a snapshot of the St. Francis Dam ruins, documenting how it was one of a dozen taken while “on my vacation.” The photographer acknowledges the “terrible disaster,” but his visit also included a picnic with Effie. snapshot culture 283 specific—which spawned such a tremendous range of local views in the golden age—gave way to the general. To Evans’s chagrin, few people seemed to mind. This transformation of postcard culture did not mean that Americans had lost interest in visual images or photography—far from it. The evolution of postcards in American life had not occurred in a vacuum but coincided with myriad social transformations revolving around the ascendance of motion pictures , the permeation of radio and television into the nation’s living rooms, and the explosive growth in image-based tabloids and magazines like Life and Look. Changes in postcard culture also reflected increased reliance on telephones as a means of personal communication. But perhaps most importantly, the change correlated with an expansion of personal, amateur photography. From the 1920s on, inexpensive, easy to use cameras became a staple of the American family. As a consequence, snapshot photography boomed on a scale that approached, and likely exceeded, the manufacture of picture postcards at the high mark of the golden age. While personal photography had played a role in early postcard A young woman appears less than excited by a stop at Coolidge Dam in central Arizona. Completed in 1930 to store water for American Indian tribes in the lower Gila River Valley, this multiple dome dam (a variant on multiple arch design) was located about ten miles south of U.S. Route 70 (and about eighty miles east of Phoenix). Transcontinental travelers frequently visited the imposing structure named in honor of President Calvin Coolidge. snapshot culture 284 Whether called Boulder or Hoover, the huge concrete dam across the Colorado River near Las Vegas became a tourist attraction even before its official completion in 1935. In this snapshot from 1938 taken atop the...