Imagining the dam: The visual rhetoric of Hoover (Boulder) Dam in popular and public print media, 1920-1975.

摘要

Since its conception, Hoover Dam has been hyper-visualized through thousands of images (artistic renderings, cartoons, photographs, advertisements, and so forth) appearing in hundreds of print publications. These images form a centerpiece of what we might term a rhetoric of the dam. A contribution to the developing fields of visual-cultural studies and visual rhetoric, this study investigates Hoover Dam imagery in early to mid-twentieth century popular print media. It identifies and analyzes the arguments advanced in the complex nexus of visual and visual-verbal discourses surrounding the dam project. Critical to the analysis is a discussion of how images were deployed to shape (and exploit) public perception of and attitudes towards the dam project, and how those images worked to influence the public "image" of the dam, that is, to fix it in the American social imaginary. This study traces how visual images of the dam evolved from promissory, imaginative, artist renderings of the pre- construction period (1920-1929) to photographic documentation of the phases of building (1930-1935), and then considers the ways in which images of the dam were (re)deployed in the decades following the project's completion (1935-1975) in the service of various promotional and consumerist purposes. The analysis honors the complexity of the human, political, social, and environmental stories behind each phase of this major public works project, and juxtaposes the utopian visual narrative of economic prosperity, efficiency, and technological sublimity with an ideological counter-narrative of the domination of human laborers and the natural environment.