The World Of Laundromat Photos

I was looking over the log files for my web site Rocketjam.com the other day. One of the search phrases used to find the site was "laundromat photos". I have a little 'artsy' photo-essay on the site featuring the local laundromat. I found it curious that someone would search on that phrase and I googled it to see where my page showed up in the results. Surprisingly, it doesn't show up until the third page of Google's results. There is a whole world of laundromat photos on the web!

Google's number one hit has photos of laundromats in Lubbock Texas, perhaps an archetypal laundromat city. And of course Google yields worldwide results for laundromat pix. In my laundromat photo essay, I wrote:

"Laundromats have their own ambience. The hum of dryers and chugging and spinning of washing machines. Gray people with expressionless faces attending to a weekly cycle."

After looking at some of the sites Google turns up, I think the above is true for virtually all laundromats everywhere. I find it curious that so many people are shooting laundromats and then posting the pictures to the web. Laundromats have kind of a late 1950's/early 1960's hi-tech look. Maybe there's a feeling of innocence we associate with the futuristic aspirations of America circa 1955-1965. The hope of a world made better through high technology. The reality of the new century seems more like a William Gibson or Philip K. Dick dystopia than the future projected by Disneyland. So we use the hi-tech we now have, digital cameras and the internet, and capture nostalgia of the hi-tech past.