Switzerland (Alpine lake)
AA-2026-1EA708
On the image
Someone took this through a moving window, which was the whole point and also the whole problem. The foreground brush streaks into green smears because the car did not slow down for the view, on the theory that a fast-moving tourist could still capture a slow-moving landscape if he just pointed the camera fast enough.
Across the water a single chalet roof anchors the far shore, the rest of the village crowding in behind it the way Alpine settlements always do, having run out of flat ground centuries ago. The mountains beyond have mostly given up and dissolved into fog, which was fine, because the postcard racks back at the hotel already had the clear version.
The whole scene has gone a uniform, aging blue, the color a 1950s slide film settles into after enough decades in a box, patiently correcting the traveler's assumption that what he saw would stay exactly as he saw it.
The historian's note
This is a lakeside scene in the Swiss Alps, photographed during the postwar boom in American and European leisure travel through Switzerland's lake districts, a period when rail and early motorcar tourism made routes along lakes such as Lucerne, Walensee, and Lake Lugano accessible to a growing middle-class traveling public.
The steep-shored, fjord-like lake and the compact lakeside settlement with a single prominent chalet roof are characteristic of the lake valleys threaded through central and eastern Switzerland, where villages were built directly against the water's edge because the mountains left no other usable ground.
Color slide photography, newly affordable to amateur travelers in this decade, is responsible for the picture's now-uniform blue tone, a common chemical shift in aging transparency film of the era rather than a feature of the original scene.
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Blurred Roadside View of an Alpine Lake Village, Switzerland, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-1EA708. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/blurred-roadside-view-of-an-alpine-lake-village-switzerland-1950s.
@misc{aaAA20261EA708,
title = {Blurred Roadside View of an Alpine Lake Village, Switzerland, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-1EA708},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/blurred-roadside-view-of-an-alpine-lake-village-switzerland-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Blurred Roadside View of an Alpine Lake Village, Switzerland, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-1EA708 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/blurred-roadside-view-of-an-alpine-lake-village-switzerland-1950s ER -
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