Artwork: San Francisco Night View, Bay Bridge and Battleship Searchlights and Lights of Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda in Distance, 1938
The “good old days.” Everyone’s talking about ‘em. They exist as a hazy, faded memory of glory and gold, of a time when everything was shiny and new. The sky’s the limit, possibility’s infinite—all your dreams can come true. It is nothing short of heaven on earth. To tell people it’s a fantasy is just a hard way to go; people pin their hopes to the illusions life bestows. And they fuel this illusion with artifacts from the past.
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Postcard America: Curt Teich and the Imaging of a Nation, 1931–1950 by Jeffrey L. Meikle (University of Texas Press) is the blueprint for the vision of the country at its greatest heights. Perhaps it was the fact that these images of grandeur were created during the height of the Great Depression and the early postwar years, that this these are the images held so near and dear to the country’s identity. It was do or die, survival was on the line, and every last bit counted.
Artwork: A Breaker on Atlantic Ocean, 1933