Tag: Oskar J. W. Hansen

SNAPSHOT CULTURE

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The next to the last chapter in Pastoral and Monumental: Dams, Postcards, and the American Landscape delves into the decline of the postcard in American life. Donald Jackson concluded that it was a form of communication that competed with new technologies:

Postcard culture did not end in cataclysmic collapse. It slowly shrank as a distinctive feature of modern life, ceding ground to mass media as well as to amateur   photography, slide projectors, and super 8 home movie footage. With the ascent of personal video cameras and recorders in the late 1970s, the creation and consumption of images became ever more integrated into American’s social fabric. Digital technology of the twenty-first century with every cell phone and PDA serving as a camera has only further entrenched images into the social media that connects people through a flourishing Internet. A century ago, there was no Internet. Instead, a burgeoning mail system provided a mechanism for the sharing of visual imagery on a scale that someone at the beginning of the nineteenth century—before the invention of photography—would have found astonishing, if not beyond belief. Picture postcards of the early twentieth century represented an amazing cultural construct, one involving a tremendous range of participants and devotees.

(click on image to enlarge)

Dr. Jackson observed that in addition to commercially produced imagery of dams, the public created their own pictures when inexpensive cameras became available:

Dams are well represented in this snapshot culture. As captured in a multitude of personal photographs, people visited, posed in front of, and relaxed at dams and reservoirs throughout the United States. From the 1920s on, the settings for such snapshots came to be dominated by monumental structures.

Mixed in with amateur-produced postcards in the book are a few snapshots.

Amateurs often copy the look of professional artists, at least to the limits of their ability and equipment. In the case of snapshots that practice has been reversed. A number of art photographers shoot snapshot style, incorporating the off-handed mannerisms of amateurs. These professionals are often collectors of images by the public. From the baskets full of anonymous family snapshots found in flea markets, they’ve pulled expressive, amusing, and the unintentionally arty image for inspiration. Like Walker Evans, some contemporary pros acquire all genres of vintage photographs.

Visitation of dams is very popular and hundreds or thousands of family snapshots memorializing these outings. Many do not identify the dam in the picture.(click on image to enlarge)

Boots and Danny did ink the back of their snaps, identifying Hanson’s big sculpture as a “winged statue—Boulder Dam, 10-9-54.” (click on image to enlarge)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photography arrived without a stylistic tradition. Its esthetics evolved with more vernacular input than painting, which evolved over centuries of academic study. Camera imagery was often not considered art or suitable for museum display. Its documentary value was recognized from its earliest days.

 

 

 

 

 

THEY DIED TO MAKE THE DESERT BLOOM

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Hoover Dam Snow Globe. This impressive desktop ornament is marked on the bottom Three Js Imports JJJ Inc. Northbrook, Illinois USA. Made in China. Like the Las Vegas snow globe with a Hoover Dam feature (see The Payton Dam Collection), it’s probably designed by the same uncredited person. Souvenirs of any kind, even postcards, of this monument to perished dam workers are uncommon. This one is 6 inches tall, very detailed and has a windup music box.

 

Oskar J. W. Hansen, Norwegian-born sculptor, was chosen by architect Gordon B. Kaufmann who had been brought on by the Bureau of Reclamation to modernize the original Greek look of Boulder (Hoover) Dam. They thought Kaufmann, the L.A. modernist, embodied the slick Art Deco style which communicated a Futurist look they sought. Both Pop Modernists did indeed add design elements that projected modernity.

There are probably thousands of printed postcards of these large bronze Pop Deco fantasy figures in the bins of antique dealers. On the back is an explanation: “These two identical bronze figures, designed by Oskar J. W. Hansen, and installed as the principal decoration at Boulder Dam, are 30’ high and are cast in bronze. One sits on either side of the 125-foot flagstaff facing the gorge of Black Canyon of the Colorado River over the crest of Boulder Dam.”

Hansen’s 30-foot-high pair of bronze winged figures flanking the 125-foot-tall flagpole are his best known decorative enhancements. Tourists photographed each other posed by these Futurist expressions. Today thousands of postcards of the winged apparitions are for sale by dealers in vintage postcards.

Little appreciated and virtually unreproduced on postcards is the work Hansen possibly felt was his most profound—the memorial to the workers who perished building Hoover Dam. How many died is not known. Estimates run as many as 90 to 114. Some historians believe the number could be higher.

In Imaging Hoover Dam, Anthony F. Arrigo has a wonderful description of this unusual, sculptured monument:

In keeping with the approach of New Deal artwork, Hansen glorified the laborer. One of his pieces at the dam is a bronze plaque commemorating the men who died while working on the project with the words “They died to make the desert bloom” arcing across the center of the piece. In this image a laborer rests with his legs beneath the waves, his impossibly narrow torso leads up to a broad, muscular chest and shoulders, his face turned upward toward the sun, while the symbols of power, irrigation, and conservation rise above him. The hands of the laborer are stretched upward, suggesting homage to the Great Spirit and to the power required to achieve feats such as building the dam and controlling nature. At the top of the plaque are wheat and gourds, food staples of indigenous peoples that also symbolize the bounty that will result from the continuous supply of irrigation water to the Southwest. These images are described by one writer as expressing “the artist’s belief that productive control over natural forces is obtained through trained physical strength and knowledge of our environment.”