Monday, May 01, 2017

20 Images : 6. Atlantic Richfield Company Share Certificate

20 Images : 6. Atlantic Richfield Company Share Certificate


It is all very well somebody wittering on about "the beauty of manufactured grandeur", but you might take some convincing if you live next door to a chemical works or oil derricks spread from your garden lawn like tar-soaked sunflowers. Beauty and industry are not only strange bed-fellows, but also only very occasional ones. Corporate industry, however, is always keen to ally itself with the classical concept of beauty, and no more so than on share and stock certificates. The image today is a detail from a 100 share stock certificate which was issued by the Atlantic Richfield Company of Pennsylvania. Industry is portrayed as a cinema starlet with flowing skirts embracing the entire globe in her entrepreneurial passion. As far as I can make out, that passion was, in reality, limited to building petrol filling stations across the cities and plains of America.

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