“Good Roads, leading to Winston-Salem, N.C.,” a postcard produced by the national retailer S.H. Kress & Co. to sell in its North Carolina five-and-dime stores, pulls us in different directions at once (Figure 1). The road, well-graded, neatly surfaced, and bright, is the dominant element of the frame, winding gently away from the viewer over the piedmont to the landscape’s vanishing point. In the foreground, an open-topped automobile, seemingly in motion, is about to zoom past, an ambiguous chauffeur at the wheel driving a finely dressed White lady, who appears elegant and composed in the back seat. The dark figures of what appear to be mules stand yoked to the right of the roadbed, while three tiny human figures can be discerned down the road beyond them, perhaps watching the second car go by. The lines of the road, suggesting mobility and flow, contrast with relative stasis of the forests and fields that the road bisects. In the face of this paradox, the image evokes a neat sense of order and harmony, a timelessness that, like more classical forms of landscape (Cosgrove, 1990), tends to erase the conditions of its production
