General Motors Powerama, 1955

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General Motors Powerama, 1955 — Archive & Atlas

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General Motors Powerama, 1955 — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1955

AA-2026-4E37F5

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Three visitors, two women and a child, stand before a promotional booth at the 1955 General Motors Powerama exhibition, a traveling showcase of automotive innovation that toured the United States in the mid-1950s. The booth's signage is direct and unapologetic about what it represents: the future belonged to General Motors, and this event existed to prove it. Behind them, through the latticed framework, other fairgoers mill about under an orange and blue structure designed to look modern by the standards of the moment—which is to say, optimistic about industrial capacity and consumer desire in roughly equal measure. The women are dressed for what was understood as a public outing, which meant dresses and coats and the kind of attention to appearance that suggested visiting a GM exhibition was worth preparing for. The child holds something small, gripped carefully in both hands. What was being sold here was not just cars but the idea that technology and corporate scale had solved the problem of American life, and that seeing the evidence in person, on a Saturday afternoon under California sun, was how a family spent its time.

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