Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

Matteo Terzaghi

mythology, I explained that I just wanted to have a leisurely look at them, that’s all. They reminded me of rainy childhood afternoons spent indoors. Their image quality harkens back to the era when four- color printing was the norm, things were sometimes slightly off register, and scanners and digital retouching were still the stuff of fantasy. Seeing how certain images are contoured, you can almost hear the snip-snipping of scissors. The backgrounds are either flat and saturated or out of focus: dark green, orange, blue, ruby red . . . And then there’s the tone of the titles and captions, which exude the euphoria of that era. The economic and technological boom meant that Western Europe— despite the Cold War, the atomic threat, and all the rest—could still believe in a radiant future, perfectly protected by an iron-clad network of positive certainties. Those were the days of door-to-door salesmen, who thrust a foot forward to prop open the doors of housewives whose heads were filled more with curlers than curiosity regarding The Secrets of Geology . Yet they’d still end up buying the whole set, on a payment plan, probably in installments that would then be bound in pleather covers once the series was complete. And then came the bookshelves. The rapidly expanding middle class was outgrowing its kitchenettes and dinettes, and needed a nice living room to relax in as the

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