Las Vegas Car Culture, 1958

Regular Influx devotees will realise that we spend a righteous amount of time scouring the World Wide Web for vintage images that reflect car culture down the ages in order to share their beauty.

It’s an addictive, time-​​consuming pursuit but one we think is worthwhile.

If you’re not aware of the past, so goes the saying, you can’t make proper plans for the future.

With that dictum in mind we were stoked to find these beautiful shots of Las Vegas that date from, we would guess, around 1958.

Wrought in the cult-​​provoking and recently discon­tinued film stock known as Kodachrome, they shine an incredibly intimate light on a bygone era – and illus­trate perfectly how the colour and variety of car design from that American boom time has these last 50 years been so influ­ential on popular culture the world over.

Not being experts of chrome-​​clad Yankee iron, we can only make an educated guess: we think the off-​​white car in the foreground of the shot above is a ’57 Chevy (look closely and dig the glamorous girl in white shades riding in the back).

We would appre­ciate the feedback from any of you American car experts out there to name the rest of this colourful assemblage.

The shot below, meanwhile features a beauti­fully framed Ford Thunderbird, offset nicely by the other­worldly archi­tecture of 50s Vegas.

Imagine what shots from these exact perspectives would look like in 2010?

Images via A Continuous Lean.