Florida’s Postwar Consumer Culture: Home Shows, Hobby Exhibitions, Automobiles, Appliances, and Civic Life in 113 Photographs and Negatives from Pinellas County, 1950–1952

George Fulmer Sunbelt Migration

Photograph

George Fulmer photo archive documenting exhibition culture in Clearwater and Pinellas County, Florida, circa 1950 to 1952, recording the public settings through which a rapidly expanding Florida community encountered houses, furnishings, appliances, automobiles, hobbies, agriculture, and civic organizations. Fulmer, a longtime Clearwater commercial photographer and former U.S. Navy photographer, worked during a decade in which Pinellas County's population more than doubled, producing a substantial photographic record of the businesses and associations serving that growth. Particularly revealing are the home and retail exhibitions, where the expanding market for Florida housing was translated into displays of furniture, electrical appliances, interior decoration, landscaping, and other components of postwar domestic life.

Photo archive of approximately 113 items including 56 silver gelatin photographs and 57 large format associated negatives retained in Fulmer's numbered studio envelopes, Clearwater and Pinellas County, Florida, circa 1950 to 1952. The envelopes identify individual assignments and clients, preserving the commercial circumstances behind many of the images. Captions include repeated "Hobby Show" commissions name Marcus Lifshutz, Thomas Dowd, Edward Marchiselli, and Seth R. Guy Kendall, while other assignments identify Mather Furniture, Adams Electric, Orange State Motor Co., a Jaycees fair, a Largo cattle auction, a flower show, a garden club show, and yacht or regatta presentations. Fulmer photographs crowds pressing into Mather Furniture during a sale; refrigerators and other appliances arranged as consumer displays; automobiles exhibited at a fair; floral arrangements, table settings, plants, stamps, birds, and handicrafts presented for inspection; and a cattle auction conducted before a seated audience beneath poultry and dairy feed advertisements and signs for a "Guernsey cattle sale" and "Better farm family living." Hobby show photographs include extensive philatelic displays and an exhibition centered on the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Another records the "Bay Pines Hobby Shop," sponsored by D.A.V. chapters and auxiliaries of Pinellas County, with disabled veterans and other participants posed beneath an American flag. The range extends from private domestic interiors and formal trophy presentations to commercial sales and crowded public exhibitions, identifying the named businesses, organizations, clients, and consumers that occupied Fulmer's professional field.

Clearwater's exhibition culture developed in tandem with the extraordinary postwar transformation of Pinellas County, when migration, suburban construction, automobile ownership, and new household formation created a growing market for homes and the goods used to furnish them. Home shows and related commercial exhibitions made that market public, allowing builders and merchants to turn the new Florida household into a demonstrable package of appliances, furniture, decoration, landscaping, and modern conveniences. Fulmer's assignments also preserve the coexistence of that emerging suburban economy with older agricultural Pinellas County: cattle auctions and feed advertising occupy the same photographic record as automobile exhibits, furniture sales, electric appliances, civic clubs, veterans' organizations, and leisure pursuits. Light handling wear and occasional surface marks to the photographs and studio envelopes; some negatives show warping and degradation. Overall archive in very good condition.

Item #23855

Price: $750.00