These picture postcards capture the monumental scale of America in the early 20th century
A look back at the future in progress
Imagine a time when photographs were still precious. Before television or picture magazines. Before Insta. A time when most people were only beginning to reckon with the role of pictures in everyday life.
Then imagine being handed a postcard with a densely detailed photo printed on one side. There in miniature was a world not unlike your own. Recognizable yet distant, a palm-sized existence neatly cropped and boxed and easy to share. If you look closely you might even see the people assembled like ants at the edge of the frame. Like you they are awed by what they see. Small, but not without consequence, they are part of something. Like you they yearn for the future.
The Detroit Publishing Company was once one of the largest purveyors of photography in the world. At its height the company sold over seven million postcards and prints a year—images culled from an archive of over 40,000 negatives acquired and commissioned from the late 1800s through the 1910s.
Seen today, the Library of Congress housed collection offers an uncannily clear view of American striving at the dawn of the 20th century.
Postcards portrayed our country as it was, as it wanted to be, and as it saw the future rapidly approaching. Enterprise and engineering were taming a larger-than-life landscape, and science was wielded in the name of progress. Their ambition is registered to scale by the tiny figures populating many of these photographs. Shadowed by behemoth ships or skyscrapers, dwarfed by the machinations of development, here the individual is at once subjected to and enraptured by the mess and mass of his own creation.
Preoccupation with space and size, it seems, is wedded to the American spirit. Only now do we live with the consequences.
In its purely indexical role, photography has always struggled with depictions of scale. Shrink the Grand Canyon down to a wallet-sized reproduction and you might as well be looking at a backyard ditch. The magic of photography — its capacity to transport a viewer through time and space — had to be learned. But once we did, our thirst for pictures became insatiable.
The Detroit Publishing Co. collection was the subject of Michael Lesy’s Dreamland: America at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (New Press, 1997).
