In 1995, as part of its presentation of the exhibition, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal commissioned California photographer Catherine Wagner to create a visual essay on the four Disney theme parks. Wagner, fascinated by the importance of illusion--what Disney calls "magic"--photographs the parks without visitors, encouraging viewers to project themselves into the images. The photographs add another layer of deception to an already simulated world, reinforcing the fiction of normalcy in Disney parks, multiplying their optical illusions and shifts in scale, and taking advantage of the intense colors. Demonstrating both the magic of the parks and how the illusion is constructed, these photographs are a critical essay on the mechanism of representation.

© 1998 Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution