Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
Time-less: West Virginia's Tourism Pitch in the 1970s
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
My paper studies the visual strategies of West Virginia tourism promotion during the “Wild, Wonderful” campaign of the early 1970s. State Department of Commerce photographers fanned out to build an image library for promotional use. Their editorial decisions created a specific brand for West Virginia, designed to detach the experience of the state from twentieth-century timelines of economic and environmental exploitation. I connect this story to the scholarship of cultural geographers and anthropologists who study notions of pastness, authenticity, and embodiment within tourism. I consider how the state government used photography and travel features to frame tourism possibilities at a time of negative media scrutiny and glaring social inequities.
I focus on two aspects of promotion: the role that mountain backdrops and whitewater rivers played in their construction of wildness and the staged phenomenon of the writers’ tour, in which state photographers guided journalists to attractive sites. The Commerce staff combined spectacular and mundane landscapes in their work, all meant to encourage an inward-turn by tourists. Vacationers who were preoccupied with the state’s sensuous aspects would presumably not notice such material factors as pollution, poverty, or lack of infrastructure. Using interviews with government photographers and state promotional materials, I argue that the image of West Virginia which emerged in advertising campaigns was both timeless (enduring) and time-less (atemporal). Ultimately, I show the politics behind the attempt to convince travelers that the Mountain State was charmingly apolitical.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Ed Slavishak is an Associate Professor of History at Susquehanna University. He’s the author of Bodies of Work: Civic Display and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh (Duke, 2008) and Proving Ground: Expertise in Appalachian Landscapes (Johns Hopkins, 2018). His current research projects consider tourism promotion, attention and distraction, and early automobility.
Time-less: West Virginia's Tourism Pitch in the 1970s
My paper studies the visual strategies of West Virginia tourism promotion during the “Wild, Wonderful” campaign of the early 1970s. State Department of Commerce photographers fanned out to build an image library for promotional use. Their editorial decisions created a specific brand for West Virginia, designed to detach the experience of the state from twentieth-century timelines of economic and environmental exploitation. I connect this story to the scholarship of cultural geographers and anthropologists who study notions of pastness, authenticity, and embodiment within tourism. I consider how the state government used photography and travel features to frame tourism possibilities at a time of negative media scrutiny and glaring social inequities.
I focus on two aspects of promotion: the role that mountain backdrops and whitewater rivers played in their construction of wildness and the staged phenomenon of the writers’ tour, in which state photographers guided journalists to attractive sites. The Commerce staff combined spectacular and mundane landscapes in their work, all meant to encourage an inward-turn by tourists. Vacationers who were preoccupied with the state’s sensuous aspects would presumably not notice such material factors as pollution, poverty, or lack of infrastructure. Using interviews with government photographers and state promotional materials, I argue that the image of West Virginia which emerged in advertising campaigns was both timeless (enduring) and time-less (atemporal). Ultimately, I show the politics behind the attempt to convince travelers that the Mountain State was charmingly apolitical.
