Horseshoe Falls from Prospect Point, Niagara Falls, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Horseshoe Falls from Prospect Point, Niagara Falls, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Horseshoe Falls from Prospect Point, Niagara Falls, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-CCE0E3

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Niagara Falls in the 1950s was the undisputed capital of the American honeymoon, a fact that suited the tourism industry, the souvenir trade, and Kodak equally well. Every summer, newlyweds and family road-trippers arrived by the station-wagon load, each one determined to photograph the same curtain of water that a hundred thousand people had photographed the summer before, and the summer before that, framed through the same municipal flower beds planted specifically to give the falls a foreground.

This view, taken from the landscaped observation area on the American side looking toward the Canadian Horseshoe Falls, is that photograph — the one every visitor took because the parks commission had arranged the shrubbery to make it inevitable. The flowers in the foreground are doing exactly what they were planted to do: making a 167-foot waterfall look like it needs decorating. The Technicolor saturation of the color process turns the mist luminous blue, which is either an artifact of the era's film chemistry or simply what Niagara looks like when you want it to.

What the tourists believed, snapping this in the fifties, was that they were capturing something personal and unrepeatable. What they were capturing was the most photographed waterfall in North America, from the approved angle, in peak season, exactly on schedule.

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