AA-2026-67FA63
On the image
Someone stood on a ferry or pleasure boat in the middle of one of the Great Lakes in the 1950s and pointed a camera at the opposite shore, probably Detroit or another industrial city, and snapped this reminder that on any given afternoon the American middle class was out on the water doing exactly this—traveling across it, looking at it, proving they had time and a boat ticket. The skyline sits in the haze the way industrial cities actually looked then, before anyone called it a problem, and the photographer has captured nothing but the banal fact of distance and water and civic buildings on the far side. What is remarkable is that someone thought this view was worth recording at all, which was the 1950s in a single frame: the weekend excursion, the middle distance, the faith that being somewhere else, however briefly, constituted an event.
Visually related — by likeness
Great Lakes Shoreline from the Water, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-67FA63. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/great-lakes-shoreline-from-the-water-1950s.
@misc{aaAA202667FA63,
title = {Great Lakes Shoreline from the Water, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-67FA63},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/great-lakes-shoreline-from-the-water-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Great Lakes Shoreline from the Water, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-67FA63 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/great-lakes-shoreline-from-the-water-1950s ER -
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