Allied Nations Flags at International Exhibition, 1950s

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Allied Nations Flags at International Exhibition, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Allied Nations Flags at International Exhibition, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-AA2205

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Somewhere in the postwar world, someone decided the best way to demonstrate international goodwill was to plant the flags of allied nations in a row and let the wind sort them out. The Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes anchor the lineup, with the West German tricolor and what appears to be the Belgian flag filling the middle — a guest list that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier and that in the 1950s represented a considered diplomatic statement about who was back in the club.

The flagpoles stand against a rubble-stone wall and neatly trimmed hedges, the kind of landscaping that signals a fairground, a trade exposition, or an international cultural center — the postwar decade ran on these, each one a cheerful argument that commerce and shared exhibit halls were better than the previous arrangement. Every participating nation got a pole. The flags snapping in the breeze were the architecture of optimism.

The photographer aimed up to get sky behind the whole row, which was the right instinct: it turned a civic decoration into something that reads, fifty years later, as a quiet inventory of which countries were speaking to each other again.

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