Look at any wikipedia page for a large city. You will notice on the right, right above the maps and infoboxes with statistical details about population and area and other such things, a spray of photos, a rosette of images, all showing in a spiral what the city looks like. There will be a skyline, a city hall/county courthouse/capitol building, a university, and one or more of the following: a park, museum or historic building. Go look at Salem, Oregon or Dayton, Ohio or Grand Rapids, Michigan for examples of this. I mean, it is true for San Francisco or New York as well, but it also continues down to most of the nation's mid-sized metros. I am actually curious just how small of a city wikipedia will display a city with marble, glass and grass: apparently, Albany, Oregon is not due an entire panorama, and has to make due with a single prosaic picture of a downtown intersection. But perhaps that is just something about Albany.
But if you are wondering whether there are ways to make Wichita, Kansas look like a shining city of the future with its towers shining in the golden hour...well, yes, more or less.
I've been thinking about this for a while. I wonder if there is some type of guide or template to what buildings can be included, and just how much their pure white marble has to contrast with the flawless blue sky behind them. But something made me decide to write about it today: the notion that everything is story, and discussion of stories and "bare facts". Because, while that is a discussion of its own: the truth is that those "bare facts" are, themselves, embellished and selected. It is true that there is an art museum in Salem, Oregon. It is not "true" in an objective sense that the art museum deserves a picture while the mall where I grew up playing arcade games and watching movies does not. (It also might not even be true in a subjective sense, if you could gather all the memories of the fine townspeople of Salem, Oregon, that the art museum is more important than the shopping mall) And yet, after being conditioned to "seriousness", we look at this photo spray of perfectly angled, perfectly lit shots with no distractions and think "yep, that is reality".
I have been tilting at this particular windmill for a while, and poked fun at Wikipedia's overly serious tone, but I once again make the point: being "serious" is not being "objective", and in fact, being "serious" is often objectively silly. And the tourist brochure photo shots that wikipedia uses to frame what exactly Harrisburg, Pennslyvania is, when they could use pictures of dead malls in murky light, is just another example of how the terms "objective" and "factual" have been blurred to mean something different.