1950s
AA-2026-9F1A25
On the image
Somewhere in the arc of postwar vacation travel, someone pointed a color camera out a window — or over a boat rail — at a glacial lake so cold and so turquoise it barely looks real, the kind of color that in 1950s Kodachrome registers as improbably saturated against dark mountain flanks still carrying last winter's snow in the creases.
The valley running into the distance was already ancient geography when the first road or ferry made it accessible to the kind of person who owned a 35mm camera and thought to bring it. That person understood they were looking at something large, and did the entirely sensible thing of pointing the lens at as much of it as possible — the full sweep of ridgeline, the glacial melt, the cloud-stacked sky — because in that era there was no way to know the camera was going to expose mainly for the sky and leave the mountains as a dark shape.
The result is less a postcard than an honest record of the gap between what the eye remembered and what the technology could catch. The mountains were not cooperating, and the lake was having none of it either.
Visually related — by likeness
Glacial Lake and Alpine Valley, Mountain Wilderness, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-9F1A25. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/glacial-lake-and-alpine-valley-mountain-wilderness-1950s.
@misc{aaAA20269F1A25,
title = {Glacial Lake and Alpine Valley, Mountain Wilderness, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-9F1A25},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/glacial-lake-and-alpine-valley-mountain-wilderness-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Glacial Lake and Alpine Valley, Mountain Wilderness, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-9F1A25 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/glacial-lake-and-alpine-valley-mountain-wilderness-1950s ER -
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