See America — Visit the National Parks WPA Poster, 1936

The story of this poster

“See America” was the slogan of the United States Travel Bureau, set up inside the Department of the Interior in the late 1930s to persuade Americans to spend their holidays at home, and the WPA Federal Art Project’s poster division in New York produced a series of sheets under it. Harry Herzog’s waterfall is the plainest and the most reproduced: a white fall between two dark green walls, a pale sky above, the water pooling at the bottom, and the two lines of lettering that turn a landscape into an instruction.

The New York division worked in silkscreen too, but on board, and the Library of Congress copy is one of those: a mounted poster with the studio’s colour bar still along one edge, which we have trimmed. Its greens and creams have been cleaned and balanced, not brightened.

The sheet is smaller than the Berkeley park posters, so it is offered at one size, 12×16, where the scan carries 246 dots per inch. It hangs well in a pair with one of the wildlife sheets from the same series, or beside the Yosemite survey map.

Printed to order on archival matte paper, framed in the country of delivery.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Restoration: trimmed the mount board and scanner margins, balanced levels while keeping the silkscreen's flat inks and paper tone (90% of the original colour retained), removed dust and specks, and applied gentle sharpening. Creases, edge wear and registration slips of the original screen printing are kept where they belong to the object; nothing is redrawn.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.