Grand Canyon South Rim Vista, Arizona, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Grand Canyon South Rim Vista, Arizona, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Grand Canyon South Rim Vista, Arizona, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1955

AA-2026-3F152E

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Someone stood at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in the 1950s and took a color photograph of one of the largest objects on earth, which required considerable ambition given that early color processes of the era were not entirely up to the task. The Kodachrome-era emulsion has shifted the entire canyon into shades of violet and indigo, turning Vishnu schist and Kaibab limestone — laid down over two billion years — into something resembling a Theosophist's fever dream.

Grand Canyon tourism was already a serious national enterprise by this decade, the Santa Fe Railway having spent thirty years telling Americans that the canyon was both sublime and conveniently accessible, so whoever pressed the shutter was participating in a well-established ritual of standing at the rim and attempting to convey enormity to people back home. The layered buttes and temple formations recede into atmospheric haze across a distance the camera can only approximate, and a lone condor or raven traces a line through the middle distance, indifferent to the entire enterprise.

The photograph does not quite capture the Grand Canyon, but it does capture exactly what it felt like to be a 1950s tourist confident that this time, finally, someone was going to get the shot.

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