Celestial Visions of the Reutlinger Photography Studio

Of the photography studios of Paris during  La Belle Époque, perhaps none were more famous than Reutlinger. Started in 1850 by Charles Reutlinger, the studio quickly rose to prominence as photographer to the stars of the theatrical stage. The business passed to Charles' brother Emile in 1880, and from him to his son Léopold in 1890. Under Léopold's initiative, the studio branched out to a brisk and creatively fruitful trade in fanciful postcards blending true photography with interesting backdrops, frames, and effects. Among the most provocative of his subjects were renditions of women among the celestial bodies. The following is a selection of Reutlinger postcards... 

L' Exposition Universelle de 1900

It was the last of its kind, the last of the true "universal" expositions and the final in string of international expositions held in Paris in 1855, 1867, 1878, and 1889. L' Exposition Universelle de 1900 was the high point of La Belle Époque and widely considered the finest of its kind ever held. Its monumental works still grace the waterfront of the Seine, including the Grand and Petite Palais, Pont Alexandre III bridge, and gare d'Orsay train station, now the Musée d'Orsay. The Paris Metro was also an inheritance of  L' Exposition Universelle, and though it did not play as strong a role in the aesthetics of the exposition, the Art Nouveau so associated with the Metro was brought to a true international audience. 

The previous major exposition was the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which presented the United States of America come of age. The frontier was declared closed and the United States turned inwards and upwards, attempting to push new frontiers of industry and establish itself as a global player on the world's political and cultural stage. France had no such compulsion. After all, it was France, generally acknowledged as the world's cultural centre. Even past Parisian expositions had a sensibility of France trying to prove itself in the wake of wartime. There little of that preoccupation in 1900... This exposition was strictly looking back at the accomplishments of the past and looking forward to the future accomplishments yet to come, while all the time celebrating the greatest in French and international art.

The Eiffel Tower and Globe Céleste.

Before Tiki: The Romance of Hawaii in the Golden Age of Travel

Tiki culture - the fantasy world of thatch-roofed bars, Hawaiian shirts, and whimsical ceramic mugs - was largely a product of post-World War II American leisure society, when soldiers who served in the Pacific returned home to build and benefit from an unparalleled economic boom. With more money and more time off than their parents could have dreamed of, reminiscing of faraway beaches and palm trees, Americans took to the road during ever lengthening vacation days while building oases for themselves at home during the off-season. Advances in transportation could bring them virtually anywhere, whether by America's developing system of highways or the flyways of the new Jet Age. With Communist Cuba off-limits, an exotic, tropical destination was placed right on Americans' doorstep when Hawaii joined the Union in 1959. The fad for anything and everything evoking Polynesia, Oceania, even Africa and the Caribbean, exploded like an atom bomb, from Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room to Martin Denny's smooth Jazz to the ubiquitous at-home Tiki bar.

Walt and Jose welcome guests to the Enchanted Tiki Room. Photo: Disney.

Americans had already been primed by Polynesian exotica for several decades before WWII. The roots of Tiki culture are found deep in the DNA of America's relationship with the Pacific, in the very first tropical supper clubs that would become Tiki pioneers, in lavish Hollywood musicals, and in radio programs broadcast from the ballrooms of Hawaii's most glamorous hotels. Despite French and English interests in the South Pacific - New Zealand, for example, and Tahiti - it was the Americans' unique relationship with Hawaii that fostered the development of Tiki culture... Not as cultural appropriation, but rather, as an expression of genuine Americana.

Resolution and Adventure with fishing craft in Matavai Bay (1776) by William Hodges.

Bioshock Infinite, New Religious Movements and Utopian Communities

It is sometimes joked that the United States has never met a heresy that it didn't like. Constitutional barriers to the establishment of religion and the frontier mentality of American settlement fermented a petri dish of new religious movements throughout the Nineteenth century, many of which translated into would-be utopian communities. These communities were not strictly religious either, with many established on secular political, economic and philosophical ideals. All of them failed in one way or another, whether they fractured from within or could not sustain themselves in conflict with the laws of the nation. Both of these trends are reflected in Bioshock Infinite's flying utopian city of Columbia and its cult-like leader Zachary Hale Comstock.

Father Comstock sees a vision of a floating city, a new Eden.

When the Nineteenth century began, Christianity in the United States was in the early stages of what would be called the "Second Great Awakening." This movement was expressly evangelistic, restorationist and personalistic, eschewing the established denominations for forms of religion that emphasized personal conversion, charismatic leaders, heightened emotionalism, and counter-culture radicalism, while dispensing with what they perceived as accumulated traditions, and expressed through ad hoc associations like "cults," camp meetings and tent revivals. Their success can be attributed in many respects to what was later described in Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis": an ethos of individualism and self-reliance that was responsive to the demands of frontier settlement, with a mistrust of the established, systemic authority of governments, aristocracies, the arts, churches and academics (including scientists and formal theologians). The more spread out Americans got, the more they looked for solutions that fit their particular contexts and values. Some might argue that we still see echoes of these tendencies in the American zeitgeist.

Bioshock Infinite's Columbia and the City Beautiful Movement

At the turn of the previous century, the United States of America was undergoing a veritable cultural crisis at least as serious - if not as violent - as the Civil War. The 1890 census declared that the Western frontier had closed to new settlement, limiting the amount of available farmland and driving ever greater numbers of people into the bursting cities. By 1910, 46% of Americans lived in cities, which challenged the agrarian base that had previous defined America's economic activities. Those Americans, some 42 million people, needed to work, and found that work in factories. Factories, in turn, needed people to buy the goods they produced, creating a new culture of consumerism. However, an economic depression hit in 1893, which itself came after and during a long string of labour strikes starting with the Chicago Haymaker Riot of 1886. Advances in mass transportation allowed the better-off to retreat to the suburbs, leaving the inner cities to struggling, impoverished, working classes stuffed together in dank, diseased tenements. This decay of the city centres just as they were required to meet the needs of ever greater numbers of people created a very real problem in need of creative solutions.

In the game Bishock Infinite, Zachary Comstock suggests simply taking a whole city aloft and letting the Earth sort out its own problems. The design of Columbia, however, falls very much within one of the civic planning solutions proposed at the time in which the game is set: the City Beautiful Movement.

The guiding principle of the City Beautiful Movement was a belief in aesthetics as a moral philosophy. Beautiful environments, they maintained, would inspire civic pride and moral uprightness as citizens strove to live up to the standards of the architecture and city planning surrounding them. Charles Mulford Robinson, a journalist and leader in the movement, outlined the view that "Modern civic art desires for the beauty of towns and cities not for beauty's sake, but for the greater happiness, heath and comfort of the citizens." The chosen style of the movement's advocates was Beaux-Arts, imported from Europe. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris emphasized the principles of compositional unity and symmetry, the relationship of the elements of a building within itself and to other buildings, and the continuity of history, manifesting most frequently in Greco-Roman Revivalism. Its use would suggest that America had reached a cultural parity with the Old Country, finding a new identity as a world power now that notions of the agrarian frontier were passed. As a Neo-Classical style, Beaux-Arts was also seen to embody characteristics of order, harmony and dignity... All things that they hoped would rub off on the city's airs. In the process, the movement established the de facto official architecture of the United States.

The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893

With a decade to go before the dawn of the 20th century and 400 years after Columbus set foot on American shores, the United States was at a crossroads. By 1890, the period of Westward expansion was over: the 1890 US census announced that the last lands of the frontier had been settled. Any farmers looking for new property were forced to head north into Canada, where homesteads were still available until 1914. For the majority of people, cities provided the only means for a living. American society began the shift from agrarianism to urbanization, with all the associated ills. Advances in mass transportation allowed the better off to retreat to the suburbs on the cusp of city borders, leaving the inner cities in squalor... A process reaching its apotheosis after the Second World War. At the same time, an economic depression struck in 1893 when railway companies shuttered due to over-servicing of the market, taking investment banks down with them and rippling throughout the economy. Nevertheless, immigrants continued to arrive in droves, to the tune of 13 million over the course of the decade.

In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner presented his landmark "Frontier Thesis," outlining the theory that the American collective psyche was shaped and identified with the concept of the Western frontier. Turner argued that the process of expansion into new territories with their own natural and societal challenges required nascent Americans to abandon non-functional European institutions, including its aristocracies, churches, forms of government and hereditary entitlements. The movement West encouraged an ethos of individualism, self-reliance, and republican democracy, with consequent mistrust of the systemic authority of government and science, as well as an antipathy towards art and a commitment to the use of violence to resolve conflict. Americans found greater utility in ad hoc measures suited to the immediate environment, from vigilance committees to new religious movements. Until the admission of Utah as a State in 1896, the US government had been waging a protracted political struggle with the Mormon church, which had effectively established theocratic rule in the territory. It's been said that the United States has never seen a heresy it didn't like, and the frontier environment was ripe for the formation of groups like the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science, Southern Baptists and Pentecostals.

The closing of the frontier marked a major collective psychological crisis in America. One response was to retreat into a newly fashioned mythology about the settlement period: the invention of the "Wild West." Buffalo Bill Cody debuted his first "Wild West" show in 1883, the first cinematic Western - The Great Train Robbery - premiered in 1902, and in 1897, Charlie Russell moved off the ranch and into the artist's studio to chronicle the passing era. Another response was to engage in overseas expansion. 1893 also marked the year that American dissidents overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii and began the process to usher it into US governance in 1898. The end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 brought two new spheres of influence under the eagle's wing: the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico) and the Philippines (Guam, Philippine Islands). The latter lead to a war between American troops and Filipino freedom fighters that ended with the Philippines becoming an unincorporated American territory in 1902.

With a full-up nation and overseas aspirations, the United States came of age. No longer a frontier to be settled, many turned their attention to the question of what America was going to become and its readiness to ascend to the same echelon as the great European powers. That the 400th anniversary of Columbus' landing should coincide with America's social and psychological upheaval was providential for the organizers of the 1893 World's Exposition in Chicago. The committee was eager to apply the medium of the world's fair to the assertion of America's emergence into national maturity (or adolescence), creating a gleaming white beacon of American optimism and exceptionalism on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Thomas Moran, Chicago World's Fair.