excerpt from Americana the Beautiful Mid-Century Culture in Kodachrome® by Charles Phoenix Introduction Obsessively collecting and gleefully sharing orphaned and unwanted family and travel slides from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s in books and slide shows is a life force for me. I never dreamed that when I found an old blue shoebox marked “Trip across the United States —1957” in a thrift store in 1992 it would change the course of my life. The box was full of someone’s old vacation slides. I held a few slides up to the light and knew instinctively that they were much more than a bunch of so-called “Kodak Moments.” I had no idea who these people were, but I knew their slides were a time capsule with my name on it. So I bought them. The vacation these folks had taken nearly a half-century earlier had become a trip back in time and I was now along for the ride. I was so amazed and inspired by this kind of time traveling that I haven’t stopped collecting old slides since. The best part is that I get to share the best ones in slide shows that I present to audiences all over the country and in my books.

Fun Zone / Los Angeles County Fair / Pomona, California / 1962 [click on image to see larger version]

Searching through old slides looking for great images is the ultimate treasure hunt. It’s more entertaining than watching a television show or going to a movie. The sights, scenes and situations are absolutely real, not Hollywood’s set-dressed or CGI-wannabe versions of the past. I savor the truth of the images and the beauty of the tales they tell and the places they share. They are fact, not fiction. I love being there for that “Say ‘cheese’” moment—wherever ‘there’ is—even if it’s just for that moment, as quick as a click. Slides have taken me to every state in the nation, around the world, inside and out. I’ve seen children grow up and adults grow old. I’ve seen the American family in joy and in sorrow, in celebration and at work. Slides dispel the stereotypes of the day. They are little picture windows with a view back in time. Each one is a vehicle providing a ride-a-long to the past.

Of course, there are tons of slides that are relatively repetitive and boring. I look past those. The challenge is picking out the best images. If a collection of a thousand slides yields just one great image interesting enough to share in one of my slide shows or my books, I’m satisfied. Those are the odds I’m playing against. 1000 to 1. But it’s worth it. Fate delivers slides to me in a variety of ways. For nearly a decade I searched for them at thrift shops, estate sales and flea markets. I don’t know why people discard them. I never ask. These days they find me more often than I find them. People know I collect, so they bring them to me. Sometimes orphaned slides show up on my doorstep unannounced. I don’t know how many slides are in the collection—I stopped counting. I always say it’s quality not quantity.

The art of being a good collector is being a great editor. I edit each collection as soon as I get it. Otherwise, I’d need a warehouse to store them all. When I look at a slide I look at everything in it, all the details, all the stuff. History is in the details. Really, I’m looking for history more than I’m looking for great photography. I’m also looking for humor and irony. I don’t look at the slides; I look in the slides. Great images invite you in and make you feel like you’re there. I never reject a slide because it is out of focus—if it’s a great shot, the mind’s eye will put it in focus. This is amateur photography after all. Any images that may be valuable to me or anyone else in the future for purposes historical or otherwise, I keep. Everything else I get rid of. By now I have cataloged countless slides into thousands of subjects and locations, subdivided in hundreds of categories from Palm Springs to Brasilia, shopping centers to Christmas morning. Keeping track of them all is more than a challenge. The archive takes up half my home. Some slides are identified with handwritten captions; most are not. That leaves me to use clues in the pictures to tell where they were taken. When I find clues, I do extensive research to find out as much as I can about each slide. I’m always surprised at how much I learn.

The process of creating Americana the Beautiful began by choosing the images. I went through tens of thousands of slides before I chose my favorites for this book. I started on one side of my archive and didn’t stop for six months until no slide in the entire collection was left unviewed. Anything unique, unusual or extreme that I thought was a “maybe” was sleeved in categories ranging from “woman in the kitchen” to “Las Vegas” to “taxidermy” to “wallpaper.” By process of elimination and by excluding images that I’ve included in my previous slide-based books, God Bless Americana: The Retro Vacation Slide Show Tour of the USA and the companion to this book, Southern Californialand: Mid-Century Culture in Kodachrome, I narrowed my choices to a few hundred of the images that would best show off Americana. The two-tone Mercury Turnpike Cruiser spinning on a platform at the 1957 Miami Beach Auto Show, the gentleman’s den filled with taxidermy, and Walk-o-Wonders in a suburban shopping center parking lot went right to the top of the heap. There are such unusual shots—unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. America’s lost theme park, Freedomland USA, was earmarked for several pages. I’ve never seen any pictures of this short-lived attraction in any book. People posing with their first television sets or their amateur art were set aside. Las Vegas marquees, Florida tourist attractions and anything ultramodern or futuristic began stacking up. These subjects really say Americana to me. Then I began to imagine how the images would best lay out on a page: which would be full-page spreads and which images would unexpectedly complement each other on facing pages. The Oscar Meyer Wienermobile and the Trailblazer monorail are unrelated but look like they were separated at birth, so I put them together. I discovered the flea market scene on Chicago’s Maxwell Street, and then I found the slide of those band members posing on the street in Philadelphia look that looks like it could be the same Chicago Street. So close, yet so far away. The lady in the wallpaper shop goes so well with the man standing in the record shop. We don’t know these people. I’m sure we all know these people—or at least people just like these people. The boy’s room next to the girl’s room is a natural. Didn’t we all grow up in one of those rooms—or wish we did?

Throughout the ages man has always found ways to record his existence and preserve his past. It’s a basic human instinct. Cavemen drew pictures on their walls. Americans documenting their America have been no different throughout the years. Photography made documentation much easier as it evolved from its blurry beginnings in the mid-1800s. During the 1930s Kodak colorized photography. The most famous name in film came up with color 35mm transparency film and called it Kodachrome. The modern-day slide show was born. The depth of light and shadow and seemingly infinite palette of rich saturated colors made this new projected medium far more grown-up than any black-and-white Brownie snapshot that came before or after. Decades later, provided that they were stored properly in boxes where it’s dark and dry, Kodachrome slides have proven to be fade-resistant, unlike the far less popular other slide film brands of the day. Thanks to Kodachrome, these images of American life look as good now as they did when they were first projected.

Many photojournalists and professional photographers embraced Kodachrome, but most professionals continued to use black-and-white film in their day-to-day work documenting their subjects. Amateur mom-and-pop photographers didn’t discover Kodachrome until after World War II when Kodak began marketing the film to a broader market. The timing was perfect. Kodachrome was tailor-made to document the cultural extravaganza the USA experienced during the quarter century from the end of the war to man’s unforgettable first rocket-ship trip to the moon in 1969. This is the time period this book covers: the space age, the golden age of Americana, the era that most defines American culture. Television, suburbia, shopping centers, the V-8 engine, theme parks, drive-in theaters, Las Vegas and luaus all came of age then too. So did paint-by-numbers, TV dinners and Jell-O molds. But it was those rocket ships that made an impact on American culture and the world.

The rocket ship symbolized outer space and outer space symbolized the future. Outer space was not only mass merchandisable, but it became an aesthetic icon. Outer space affected the style and design of countless products-and perhaps nothing was more radically and obviously a symbol of the space age than the tail fins on the family car. They represented the future. And in America, “the future” meant optimism. That futuristic attitude captivated the imagination of a generation. Travel and mobility sped up to a dizzying pace. The prop age became the jet age became the space age. Conquering outer space was man’s final frontier. The USA had become the world’s superpower and being the first country to send a man to the moon was the ultimate proof. Science fiction suddenly became science fact. Progress and productivity unfolded at a pace unlike any modern country had ever experienced. America lived up to its nickname as “the new world.” And nothing captured the era more vividly, more realistically, more truthfully than the Kodachrome film that countless moms and pops loaded in their cameras.

All together the vintage slides in this book represent more than a dozen years of collecting. At this point they’ve come a long way from being someone else’s memories to being a part of a collective memory—ours. They teach us a lot about amateur photography, but not nearly as much as they teach us about Americana. There’s much more to it than baseball and apple pie. Americana doesn’t discriminate between classic and kitsch, high-tech or homespun, mass-produced or one-of-a-kind, the authentic or make-believe. It draws no borders between town and country. It embraces Mother Nature and man-made, the future, the past. Americana is the essence of American culture. These images are Americana the Beautiful.