Sprague Art Studio

Produced by the Sprague Art Studio c. 1920, these proto-conceptual pairings offer both day and night time views of the reflector-adorned signs manufactured by the Nite Lite Advertising Company of Joplin, Missouri. The “night time” examples appear to have been made in the dark room, however, and not the actual dark. They were presumably created by blacking out the design on a blank negative and contact printing onto photographic paper; the result meant to simulate the reflectors as they would be seen in the dead of night, when hit with a burst of light from a passing car’s high beams. The ingenuitive images speak to photography’s long history of concocting truth when there is none available.