If cars sped across the landscape, glimpsing roadside scenery without fixed orientation, did the landscapes of license plate promised a sort of counterpoint? The recognition of place in the frames of plates, increasingly born of qualitative arts, emerged in the 1950s, after all, in reaction to the growth of drives on highways, and the velocity of interstate travel. Was this due to the death of the paper map, I started to wonder? Or the replacement of physical maps with GPS guidance systems? What of the fate of the maps whose forms used to once define license plates? Bear me out. But if the plate was a unashamed symbolization of the power of the midwestern state at the nation’s cartographic center, in recent years, the pictorial plate, if perhaps encouraged by the addition of embossed landscapes, seem to have grown in detail to the seek to restore a sense of specificity of place, to compensate for the placeless spatiality that has become dominant for motorists on most paved highways. –as its logo, remembering the central place of Indiana on those unfolded highway maps.
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