AA-2026-FB2466
On the image
Somebody spent a weekend, maybe several, driving these posts into hillside scree and stringing wire through gambel oak and ponderosa pine, on the assumption that a boundary drawn by hand would be respected by cattle, weather, and neighbours alike. The fence runs downhill in loose, hand-set posts rather than a surveyor's straight line, which is what happens when the property line is decided by whoever owned the land and the shovel, not by anyone with instruments.
This was the ordinary infrastructure of the rural mountain West at midcentury: three or four strands of wire, unpainted timber posts cut from the same slope they now stand on, built to keep livestock in or out and to say, quietly, that this side belongs to someone. No gate is visible, no house, no animals grazing behind it, only forest reasserting itself around the wire, since a scrub oak thicket does not care whose fence it is growing through.
The photographer aimed at nothing more dramatic than a fence line and a hillside of pine, which is exactly the kind of unremarkable, functional scene that a family with a new colour slide camera in the 1950s photographed simply because it was there, and because film, unlike a fence post, did not require years to prove whether it would hold.
Visually related — by likeness
Hand-Strung Wire Fence Through Scrub Oak Hillside, American West, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-FB2466. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/hand-strung-wire-fence-through-scrub-oak-hillside-american-west-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026FB2466,
title = {Hand-Strung Wire Fence Through Scrub Oak Hillside, American West, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-FB2466},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/hand-strung-wire-fence-through-scrub-oak-hillside-american-west-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Hand-Strung Wire Fence Through Scrub Oak Hillside, American West, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-FB2466 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/hand-strung-wire-fence-through-scrub-oak-hillside-american-west-1950s ER -
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