Photographic

• DOWNLOAD | DEPECHE MODE “Photographic” (Rex the Dog Dubb Mix) Remixes: 81-04, 2004

I found this print, and five others just like it, at the Brooklyn Flea last weekend while rummaging through a box of vintage photographs. Each photo depicts what appears to be a different window display — selling refrigerators, dishwashers, lamps, or in this case, electric water heaters — and, according to their dated ink stamps, the collection was taken between 1956 and 1963 for the Philadelphia Electric Company. This image was the first to catch my eye: I loved the grainy black-and-white texture, the painstakingly hand-drawn type, and the Mondrian-styled painting in the background — which comes, seemingly, from nowhere.

I’m writing about these photos because they somehow articulate the relationship between mid-century aesthetics and the culture that adopted them with endearing clarity. But as a writer, I’m also inevitably piqued by the language of this period, and the implications of its unpretentiousness. These were a people so unfazed by hyperbole, for example, that the word ECONOMICAL felt like a complete pitch in itself. In another image, the Philadelphia Electric Company reflects the modesty of its customer by humbly gloating over the “adequate” food storage their refrigerator provides. A third display, for table lamps, rejects notions of luxury for the decidedly pragmatic claim that your home will have BETTER LIGHT!

This was, of course, in the B.C. Era — before Cribs.

The visuals are clean and uncomplicated, and the pitch follows suit; the word “economical,” it seems, also applied to the unhyped application of message and medium. I want to believe that, on some level, this still works. But I feel like, one day, it will seem amazing to own evidence that it ever worked at all.