Promotional Photographs of Caronia
Over the past several years of building the Caronia Timeline I've seen several photographs used in helping to promote the ship. While her building in the UK was causing a bit of a sensation, especially as the country was still very much in recovery after WWII, the same could not be said for the USA, despite the best efforts of a very enthusiastic Cunard publicity team.
Obviously, the colour choice for the ship was sufficiently unusual to cause heads to turn when she was being seen in port, and was also cause for commentary by journalists, but was this enough to spark further interest? After all, the publicity department activity was all about putting bums on beds!
While several photographs within her promotional brochures were generics that could have been photographed on board any ship in the fleet, actual photographs were really quite thin on the ground. Before the days of computers and being able to manipulate graphic images at will, there was quite an art to making physical photographic prints that essentially came from exposing negatives over reactive paper.
issued to travel agents in the USA
[Image: Courtesy of Dave Chayka]
The photograph above is a classic example of this, where a little over-exposure has been needed in some areas to make the image a little more dramatic. The bow area below the ship's name was notoriously difficult to photograph without unsightly shadows. Taking those out without blanking out the name was where the artistry lay.
Here it's so over-exposed that the bow shape and all the plating and rivetting detail is lost. This was actually no bad thing! It made the ship look much more modern and sleek, just like the welded constructions of 60 years later. As a huge print hanging in a travel agent's office, it was bound to catch the eye.
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