Where the Apple store now sits in Grand Central there used to be the largest photograph in the world. For 40 years starting in 1950, Kodak’s Colorama displayed its 18 feet high and 60 feet wide slice-of-life photographs in the Grand Concourse. Now, though on a much smaller scale, the New York Transit Museum has an exhibit in homage to what was once an incredible display of public advertisements disguised as art, just below street level.

The small versions of those amazing transparencies demonstrate strong family values and American white-picket-fence aspirations, encouraging onlookers that they too could take pictures of such scenes as long as they used Kodak film. The pieces display an idealized America with an almost campy sense of patriotic joy, all enriched with a saturated palette. Kodak staff photographers shot most of the images, but Ansel Adams, Ernst Haas and Eliot Porter also contributed their talent.

More impressive than seeing the actual advertisements is to learn the amount of engineering each image required. It took 450 feet of print film needed to create each rear-lighted transparency, which were then unrolled like a horizontal window shade with hooks every six inches. Of course, the museum’s exhibit is not nearly as dramatic as the arresting advertisements must have been, but the are a reminder of what was once there and they reflect an America that never really was, but which is fascinating all the same.

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