Images on the Move

Front matter

Olga Moskatova (ed.) Images on the Move

Media Studies | Volume 76

Olga Moskatova (Dr. phil.) is an assistant professor for media studies at Friedrich- Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her fields of research include theory and aesthetics of visual media, materiality of media, and networked images.

Contents

Introduction: Trajectories of Images Olga: Möskatove nn een n nee Beeren enge ne 7

Networked Images and Image Networks

Greetings from Chicago: Image Networks and Infrastructures of Postcard Production and Circulation Ellen Handy segere Baer Be IR RHEIN else 31

Introduction

The increasing speed, mobility and distribution of digital photographic images today, particularly through networks of social media and web presentation, produces a dazzling oversupply of images that can only be understood in relation to their circulation, and this we may consider an emblem of the condition of the twentyfirst century. Yet this phenomenon closely recapitulates that of the early twentieth-century’s boom in the production and circulation of photographic images as postcards through photomechanical reproduction, making it propitious to reconsider the proliferation and transmission of postcards. That vast sea of images has a history, valuable as a foundation for interpreting the near-infinite trajectories of images today. Now almost obsolete as an image genre, postcards are nevertheless a recent enough memory today for most adults that they haven't yet quite been lost to the antiquarian status of daguerreotypes or Victrola cylinders, perhaps because they adumbrate aspects of our present culture of digital images.

The photographic postcard genre was born in the late nineteenth century and came of age c.1900. Many millions of photo-based postcards were transmitted globally, their production dependent on heavy machinery rather than software, and their circulation tied to rail, road and postal networks. In America, sites that were not really sights became views for the tourist market, as virtually every small town was systematically photographed to produce postcards available to be mailed to remote destinations. Postcards were on the move in vast networks of production and circulation: Original source photographs were created in situ, transmitted to an urban postcard factory for printing, and returned for sale as mass-produced print runs of postcards to the locality depicted. Once purchased, they might be inscribed, mailed and preserved in albums. Postcards arriving by then-rapid and reliable postal delivery were precursors of e-mail; in their pairing of brief inscriptions and images, they were precursors of text messages, and since unlike formal, sealed letters, they were open to be read by all, they somewhat resemble tweets as well. Moreover, postcards are part of the history of “conversational images,” i.e. images we converse with and not about that proliferate in the form of connected photography we share on the internet (Gunthert 2014, par. 23).

SAKIA

©c. t. a co.

Figure 2.1: Curt Teich Company, Greetings from Chicago, 1940s.

The enormous production of topographical photographic postcards between 1900 and 1950 by the Curt Teich Company of Chicago, proud operator of “the largest postcard factory in the United States,” offers a case study of the circulation and distribution of images and the infrastructural networks necessary for it.” Best known for the “Gruss aus” or “Greetings from” postcard format (Fig. 2.1), in which the name of a city was formed from large letters filled with images of that city’s icons, the Teich Company represented the nation with postcard views of nearly every municipality.? The millions of postcards they produced and disseminated demonstrate a curious amalgam of image genres, including reportage, advertising, mass-produced nostalgia, and more. Views of landscapes, cityscapes, sights and business premises constituted the bulk of the Teich postcard repertoire, but it also included popular ethnographic images and hand-drawn racialized caricatures of African-Americans, Native Americans and Asians. Although the postcard phenomenon was a global one, the Teich Company almost exclusively specialized in postcards of American sites. Jeffrey Meikle, the dean of Teich postcard studies, subtitled his history of the company’s production “Imaging of a Nation” (2016). Teich's postcard empire relied on an industrial infrastructure connecting producers, retailers, salesmen and individual consumers or collectors. In my paper, I therefore propose to address postcard circulation not so much as a process of interpersonal communication and sharing images—like it is often done in the discourses of digital images (Cheroux 2019; Gunthert 2014). Instead, I will focus on the image networks and infrastructures that enable the production, dissemination and consumption of postcards and thus condition their mobility in the first place. In terms of ANT, Ithus examine postcards as networks rather than as punctualized blackboxed actors (Law 1992; on the notion of circulation, see also the introduction to this volume).

Modernism, Modernity and Commercial Printing in Chicago: Trajectories Outward from the Center of the Continent

Industrially produced mass-cultural artifacts of printed ephemera like Teich Company postcards are certainly remote in form, audience and purpose from works of avant-garde art normally described bythe term modernist. Postcard images’ formal language was conventional rather than ground-breaking. They are usually multiply authored rather than the works of identifiable masters, and they lack many of the attributes of the modernist aesthetic Andreas Huyssens so usefully summarized in “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernisms Other” (1987, 7). That postcards are modern, however, is evident—the postcard form became prominent worldwide just as the twentieth century was beginning, and its mass production in factories using state of the art printing technology establishes it as an image category imbricated with the modern period and its methods (Brunet 2017). The production of Teich postcards and their outward trajectories from factory to the sites of their sale and consumption across the continent was specifically Chicagoan, and harnessed the capabilities of the city’s industrial infrastructure. Moving the Teich Company’s production from the category of modern mass culture to that of modernist expression requires a reconfiguration of the latter category. It is argued that Chicago modernism has its own characteristic forms, more popular, audience-oriented and comfortable with commerce and consumption than the more hermetic and austere vanguard practices of other venues (Olson 2017). Thomas Dyja emphasizes the modern corporatization so characteristic of Chicago culture, describing the city as “navigating the transformation of the cultural ideal of the common man into a national mass-marketing strategy” (2013, 336).

Associating photographic postcards with modernism requires finding space for industry and commercial distribution within the sphere of artistic production, as is logical in the context of Chicago. The city’s printed images both represent and result from its own transformations. Carl Sandburg’s celebrated personification of Chicago emphasized the industries which played central roles in reshaping the economy of the nation, and joined urban mechanized production to agricultural productivity in generating wealth and promoting growth.* Taking in photographic images from afar and transforming them into mass produced image products like postcards paralleled the older meat processing and grain transshipment industries of Chicago. Like them, the printing industry relied upon the city’s roles as “player with railroads and the nations freight handler” for the circulation of its products. Early twentieth-century commercial image printing was a manufactory that paired the might of the machine with skilled human labor in factory settings, and its products helped drive further commercial and industrial development. The city’s excellent rail (and later, highway) connections with the rest of the country made it the center of a national distribution network for raw materials and commodities.

The Chicago printing industry has attracted the attention of historians who understood its expansion as inevitable owing to location. Local booster Walter D. Moody was quoted in the Story of Chicago in Connection with the Printing Business to the effect that:

Transportation is the greatest power governing the growth or retrogression of a city. Thirty railways terminate in Chicago. This city is within a night’s ride of 50,000,000 people. Any one of these can get into a train after dinner in the evening and get to Chicago in time for breakfast. Within this circle of 500 miles is more than half the population of the United States—and Chicago is the center of the circle. (Reagan Printing House 1912, 62)

Comparing New York to Chicago, Elizabeth Baker similarly notes:

The high cost of carting tons of paper from railroad to warehouse, from warehouse to plant, thence, printed and bound, back to the railroad, has made it impossible for New York printers to bid against those who enjoy a railroad siding at their door. (1969, 85)°

Chicago printing was a growing industry for the city, central to the practices of advertising, mail order marketing and mass communications transforming modern consumer experience. The photomechanical reproduction enabling these centrifugal image torrents is closely linked to modernity in Walter Benjamin's celebrated essay (1969), but the twentieth century proved to be not merely the age of mechanical reproduction, but also that of the dissemination, exchange and consumption of images. Reproduction mandates circulation, each iteration of an image implying multiple possible trajectories.°

As New York City was the center of literary publishing and vanguard visual art, and Hollywood was the developing locus of cinematic production, Chicago became the nation’s leading center of commercial image printing. The demands of image circulation and expediency of distribution of finished products from a central point re-centered this form of cultural production from Europe and the American east coast to the upper Midwest. Histories of twentieth century American culture have often privileged accounts of modernist movements in New York and Hollywood’s hegemonic presence in cinematic mass-culture above the cultural production of Chicago, viewing the city literally in the center of the country as marginal. But what do we see when we attend to that center and its image manufactory?

Hortense Powdermaker’s pioneering anthropological study of Hollywood announced that its “mass production of fabricated daydreams” represents the “first popular art to become a big business with mass production and mass distribution” (1950, 39). This isnt precisely true, given the prior history of printed images, particularly postcards. But priority claims aside, her analysis is helpful in identifying the importance of mass audiences. She quotes a Hollywood insider who had researched popular opinion regarding the movies, finding that “The Hollywood belief that there is a difference between the big-town and small-town market is an absolute myth. A gas station attendant in Sydney, Nebraska had the same approach to the same badly made melodrama as a haberdasher in the Chicago Loop” (Powdermaker 1950, 46). That unified market for films was exactly the target audience for postcards as well. Like films, they did the work of presentation of the world near and far. But they did so in a far more intimate manner, literally coming into the homes of their viewers, for collecting, preserving and re-encountering at will. Postcards thus had the potential for sustained presence in their consumers’ lives in a way not possible for the time-based art of film.

The Teich plant was no less a dream factory than the Hollywood studios, but while in Hollywood “the industry” only meant one thing, Chicago was characterized by many industries, all visible and immediately to hand. Printing was loud, sometimes dangerous work involving volatile inks and heavy machinery. Image printing in Chicago took place in large factory spaces much like those where machinery and other commodities were produced, and it required skilled work forces, for whom image printing provided a solidly middle-class livelihood. The Teich Company plant at 1733-35 Irving Park Boulevard had specially reinforced floors designed to bear the enormous weight of its thundering presses and the tons of paper stock required to feed them, as well as the enormous windows prized by loft-dwellers today, to supply as much daylight as possible to enable the fine work by hand of the retouching department (Fig. 2.2). Different floors of the building were allocated to separate production functions, and tasks were differentiated according to gender.

Like many printing concerns, the Curt Teich Company’s roots were in Germany, where its founder was born, and where the craft of printing had reached its highest level of sophistication in the late nineteenth century. Curt Teich trained as a lithographer before emigrating to the United States in 1895. Founded in 1898 with but three employees, his company grew to boast of 275 workers in twelve departments (Retouching, Photo-Litho., Engraving, Transfer, Art, Miehle, Offset, Composing, Bindery, House Department, Cutting and Shipping Department) occupying three floors covering a full city block, and housing five Miehle Presses, six Gordons, one vertical Miehle, five Scott, and two Harris Offsets (Curt Teich Company c. 1935).

Located in a then predominately German neighborhood, the Teich factory was embellished with large signs on its roof announcing the company’s name, and direct access to a freight railroad line running along Ravenswood Avenue. Unlike commercial printing behemoth R.R. Donnelley & Sons on the city’s South Side, the smaller Teich Company seems to have employed exclusively white workers for much of its history; both firms were emphatically non-union shops.”

Figure 2.2: Retouching Department, Curt Teich Company, c. 1920.

Image and Process: From Photomechanical Reproduction to Commercial Display

The Teich Company used a number of photomechanical printing processes for postcards over the years, most derived from lithography. Chromolithography, developed in 1837, was a form of color-registered printing via lithographic stones. The photochrom process derived from it involved photographic transfer of a

(negative) camera image to a lithographic stone for printing—essentially, photochromolithography using a negative to harden a layer of bitumen to insolubility on a lithographic stone, in proportion to the light exposure received through the negative. Solvents removed the portions of bitumen not hardened, and the stone could then be inked. Photochroms gained their delicate chromatic splendor from between four and fourteen colors printed in registration, each from a separate stone. A proprietary photomechanical hybrid process, it was patented by Hans Jakob Schmid in Switzerland in the 1880s, and in the US, licensed exclusively to the Teich Company’s greatest rival, the Detroit Publishing Company (Hughes 1994; Walter and Arqué 2014). Denied the right to use photochrom, the Teich company improvised CT-Photochrom, a process based on black halftone images overprinted with only four colors (Meikle 2016, 31). Those colors were applied to base monochrome images, and Teich agents would provide customers with a color chart resembling today’s Pantone decks, to use in specifying hues for the tinting of their images. Up to 32 cards were printed grouped together at one time on Teich's sheet-fed presses, allowing the Teich Company to produce postcards in vaster quantity, if less elegant quality, than their competitor.

Although photographic images were the basis of these postcards, the final products represented interventions of the artist’s hand upon the camera image, answering to demands of production, marketing or consumption. Beyond the inevitable photographic interventions of cropping and framing, the cards featured heavy retouching and interpolation of hand-drawn elements. Working toward a less demanding and more striking result, by 1931 Teich developed what they called CT Art-Colortone, a simplified five-color process employing more brilliant inks printed from more durable and lightweight zinc plates rather than lithographic stones (Newberry Library n.d.). This process was to form the basis for Teich’s celebrated “linen” postcards, produced between 1931 and 1950. The texture (apparent in Fig. 2.1) was pleasing to the touch, but also expedient in serving to conceal the low-quality paper used for the cards, and the relatively low image resolution of the 125-line per inch printing screens employed. This process allied its products with the long pre-photographic traditions and practices of the lithographic printing industry, whose products spanned the range from fine art to inexpensive ephemera. Most evidently, the cheerful pastel tints of the process result in a color palette immediately recognizable, though rare in reality, rather like Wordsworth’s description of a painting by George Beaumont:

Ah, then, if mine had been the Painter’s hand, To express what then | saw; and add the gleam, The light that never was, on sea or land,

The consecration and the Poet’s dream. (1807)

This tinting resembled the colorization of classic black and white films, in that all of the hues were assigned rather than recorded with the making of the original image.

Imagine the craftsmen at what the Company called “postcard headquarters” working at the rows of big tables in the Retouching Department, rendering the colors and tones of a New England coastal landscape or a view of the Grand Canyon, applying that look of the ‘light that never was’ to landscapes they’d never seen. The photographers and retouching colorists didn’t meet or consult in the case of the Teich Company’s products, whereas at the rival Detroit Publishing Company, classic negatives of scenes of the American West from decades earlier by renowned landscape photographer William Henry Jackson were translated into photochrom postcards under his supervision (Hales 1996). At Teich, by contrast, image-making was almost entirely subsumed into the production work (McElroy 2015). The brand was all—it was Curt Teich’s name that was emblazoned on many of the company’s products, and yet much of the company’s business lay in producing cards for other distributors to market under their own imprimaturs, or for clients large and small, including manufacturers of practically everything, celebrated travel entrepreneur Fred Harvey, and innumerable hotels—each concerned with its own branding rather than with that of their image purveyor. Such clients were often highly exacting in requirements, which ranged from matching reality to transforming it. A furniture manufacturer might send fabric samples to insure the appropriate rendering of upholstery, or a shop proprietor might request the removal of rival businesses’ signs obscuring his premises’ facade.

As Meikle explains, a photographer or agent sent an image to Teich with color notes, then:

In the company’s art department, an airbrush artist retouched the photo by cropping, removing undesirable features, adding desirable ones, and in general sharpening and clarifying the image. Working with a halftone produced from this airbrushed photograph, a colorist then prepared a postcard-sized watercolor proof to be sent to the client for approval. At the plant in Chicago, printing plates for offset lithography were prepared in four colors—the primaries, red, yellow and blue, plus an additional dark blue which contributed a dramatic sense of depth. (Meikle 2009, 114)

Postproduction transformation of source photographs was routine. For a card representing a view of Lover’s Leap and the Narrows from Wills Mountain Inn, Cumberland MD, for instance, the directions read: “THE NATIONAL HIGHWAY SHOWS UP BLACK. RUNNING ALONG SIDE OF THE STREAM OF WATER, PLEASE MAKE SAME SHOW UP LIGHT. ADD MAN OR TWO ON TOP OF LEAP” (Fig. 2.3). Adding figures to landscapes and tidying up compositions was all in a day’s work for the Retouching Department.® It could produce clouds, change weather, summon the moon and even turn day into night.

mE Er Re FRE

Figure 2.3: Job envelope, information sheet and retouched proof for View of Lover’s Leap and the Narrows, from Wills Mountain Inn, Cumberland MD, 1925.

It is a small marvel of historical chance that many thousands of the chatty and jaunty production and retouching instructions that circulated through the Teich factory are preserved today at the Newberry Library. The company kept these notes following each print run, since the jobs only became profitable upon repeat orders, with the files available to direct production of subsequent editions as needed. Instructions were often conveyed on Teich Company “House Telegram” forms, boldly printed “Think intelligently” and “Act quickly” in their upper corners. These instructions can be assembled into a found poem about the appearance of the world and the printers’ mastery over it:

“Put in canoe or two.” “Put flag on poles, add some fellows in gray-blue uniforms.” “Take out island in distance.” “Put in about 3 yellow cabs parked along sidewalk.” “Strengthen the mountain view, a little if possible.” “Particular Customer, cards to be first class.” “Bronze turkeys are black with greenish tinge, white stripes in tail, red comb and wattle. Some turkeys are pure white, others are mostly white with light brown, on back from head to about wings. All, of course have the red comb and wattle.” “Close all the open windows and add more sidewalk on the corner.” “Show a little red in the Gasoline pump and take out the sign on building as indicated. For the street use a color that will be O.K. in your judgement.’ “Mr. Miller says he wants the words Miller Fireproof Storage imprinted across the door of the vault. Just make these letters on the photograph so they will appear on the plate.” “On the view of the Swimming Pool, please change the color of the two light blue bathing suits on the two men in the view to Navy blue.” “More color in lamp shades. Try to hold art work down to lowest possible figure.” “Color of building—like No. 9 on color chart. Perhaps a wee bit lighter.” (Curt Teich Company 1910-1940)

In making postcards, Teich retouchers took accurate and information-rich photographs and progressively introduced distortion to their syntax. Cropped, captioned, re-touched, colorized and given faux-linen surfaces, they functioned as raw material for a set of transformations. The final decisions in the Teich retouching room were repeated and circulated with a high degree of exactitude and uniformity, but those visual ideas and images were only arrived at through adulteration of the original camera pictures.

THE LARGEST POST CARD FACTORY IN THE WORLD

CURT TEICH & COMPANY PLANT. 1733-1755 IRVING PARK BLVD . CHICAGO. U S A

THE ® LINE ee en ee POST CARD

Universally used THIS SPACE FOR ADDRESS ONLY

Representing Curt Teich & Company, Inc. and their Service to you and your customers, | will call on you on or about

Yours truly.

Figure 2.4: Curt Teich Company, Appointment card for sales representatives, 19208.

The trajectories of images in the process of transformation to postcard format were bi-directional. Individual postcard consumers and collectors could not acquire cards unless retailers stocked them from the manufacturers, of course, but first photographs were made somewhere and shipped to the factory in Chicago. Print runs of cards were produced and sent to distributors, who then displayed them to potential purchasers. Profit margins at the Teich Company for individual cards were slender and the teams of sales representatives were paid on a commission basis. Numerous booklets exhorted them to greater achievements in pushing the product. These documents represent the company’s marketing to its own sales force, as when “Sales Pointers” exhorted: “The only true test of advertising is to ‘Say m it with orders” (Curt Teich Company c. 1935, n.p.).

A special version of the card depicting “postcard headquarters” was developed for staff to send to prospective clients, announcing imminent sales calls (Fig. 2.4). In addition to producing its own vast inventory of scenic postcards to sell to retailers and wholesalers, it solicited orders from clients who used postcards in their own promotion. An undated document headed “POST CARD CHECK LIST” has four headings under which various points of advice for such clients are offered:

Determine When Your Landscaping Will Be Best for Photography (What time of year will flowers and foliage be best?)

Obtaining a Photographer (Ask locally who is best—the better your transparency—the better the finished cards.)

Taking the Transparency (Go with photographer as he takes picture. Look through his camera so you know what he is including. . . . and that no cars are prominently shown in the view as they date your card.)

Composition (An attractive view of a part of your building often is better than trying to include every unit.) (Curt Teich Company 1940s, n.p.)

The Teich sales manual also advised salesmen on how to pitch vending display strategies to their clients.

The art and science of psychological post card display is a study in itself. We here at post card headquarters, however, will be glad to offer concrete suggestions for such effective displays for any one of your dealers if you will simply make your request known to us. (Curt Teich Company c. 1935, n.p.)

The company also marketed postcard dispensing machines, albums and racks. Sales methods were carefully standardized and scripted to build demand:

IN POST CARD ALBUM NO. 1, mount samples of those subjects you can supply to your trade out of your stock. Present one of these albums to each of your customers and prospective customers so they have a constant catalog on hand from which to make their own selections—so they can order direct of you by phone or mail. Keep your trade informed of all new subjects, service them with suggestions that will help them to sell more post cards and folders by making known to them that at all times the latest developments in merchandising, displays, contests, educational values, and the like. They appreciate it—they sell more—you derive a larger volume of business from their stores. (Curt Teich Company c. 1935, n.p.)

From factory production to marketing by Teich sales staff, to retail sales and consumer selection was a long chain of commercial relationships, a series of trajectories forming a larger arc of production to consumption. This arc resulted in literally millions of postcard images over half a century or so of intensive production, a ubiquity that enabled postcards to achieve enduring cultural resonance.

Representational Standardization: Encyclopedias and Microcosms in the City at the Center of the Continent

The Teich Company effectively represented the entire United States by means of postcard views of every landscape and municipality, marketing those views by means of a network of middle-men who promoted distribution of postcard views as well as touting for orders for cards of new subjects. They developed the broadest possible audiences for postcard images, which standardized topography into a system of representation in which the familiar and the alluringly unfamiliar, the known and the foreign all have their places. The drive toward encyclopedic representation, the impulse to map the known world, and the development of an orderly microcosm of systematized representation were already characteristic Chicago endeavors. The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, like all world’s fairs, constructed a symbolic microcosm on a single site, bringing the world to Chicago and linking Chicago to the world, but that was only the most prominent of the encyclopedic/microcosmic endeavors in the city. The growing cartographic empire of Rand McNally, Inc—like the Teich Company—was essentially a printing firm which chose to specialize in a particular category of production, literally mapping the world (Ackerman 1993). Donnelley and Sons, by contrast, chose to pursue the broadest possible spectrum of business, which included printing the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck mail order catalogs—themselves encyclopedic enterprises. The city at the center of the continent busied itself reducing the universe to orderly systems of representation for commerce, edification, communication and tourism, in the process becoming the locus for the reproduction, packaging and dissemination of imaged experiences of other places. Another approach to encompassing worlds was evident in Narcissa Niblack Thorne’s construction of dozens of 1/12" scale rooms perfectly representing different styles and periods of American interiors, like dollhouse rooms without inhabitants.’

The encyclopedic corpus of Curt Teich Company cards is highly conventionalized—the angled views of Anytown USA Main Streets, the vertiginous rise of mighty urban towers, the truncated perspectives of hotel lobby interiors, and the picturesque beauty spots reflecting landscape compositional strategies long ago perfected by academic artists. The making of views that could fit these templates required only moderate competence in photographic execution, buttressed by the certainty that errors and lacunae could be remedied at the Teich plant. It was in their accumulated totality that these images gained purchase upon the imagination (Meikle 2000, 271). The Teich Company’s postcard representation ofthe world is a microcosmic and an anti-cartographic pursuit. Maps display the relations of here, there and wherever, whereas the postcard picture of the world is disjunctive and accumulative, showing heres and theres but not the connections between them. The gaps in between postcard images are filled by imaginative projection, which solves the problem of scale posited in Jorge Luis Borges’ famous story about a “Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it” (1999, 325). Teich postcards described the city, and brought the nation into the city for reproduction, using ambitious image-marketing strategies and circulation resources to do so. Images did not merely circulate within the city, they also contributed to fashioning and refashioning networks of senders and recipients, as well as individuals’ relations to the known and the imagined world.

Although image production was the work of the metropolis, small towns and sites of natural beauty or wonder were also often the subject matter of postcards rolling off the presses in Chicago, just as they were of Hollywood’s productions (Levy 1990). A training manual published by the Curt Teich Company for its sales representatives announced: “COMMUNITY VANITY IS A VULNERABLE THING,” continuing:

No town is too small for an edition of colorful post cards showing the attractions of its community. Although it be located five miles from a railroad and perhaps ten miles from a main highway, there is something in that town that will attract people to it—tourists, motorists, vacationists and every one of those people is a potential buyer of souvenir post cards. (Curt Teich Company c. 1935, 3)

Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street celebrated and savaged life in just such small towns ten miles from the highway, much like a postcard album brought to life and pored over by a sensitive collector of vicarious experiences. But while Lewis (1920) viewed the small town from the point of view of its own inhabitants, the viewpoint of the postcard is that of the traveler passing through, summing up the site and codifying it as a “view.” Nondescript hamlets of little interest to the world were dignified by assimilation to the postcard view template, while scenes of sublime drama were domesticated, as is apparent in Sunset Route, Mile Creek Canyon, where a Texas-scaled sublime landscape becomes comfortably picturesque (Fig. 2.5). When composition hh alone was insufficient to reconfigure a scene as postcard picturesque, of course retouching could do the rest, as in the card where the mighty Super Chief train dominates an orchard whose lush fruit owes everything to the skill of the Teich staff, who also supplied the modestly toy-like mountain peak in the distance (Fig. 2.6).