American Teenagers at a Soda Table, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

American Teenagers at a Soda Table, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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American Teenagers at a Soda Table, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-7C9613

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Seven-Up was the respectable thing to order when you were seventeen and out with a mixed group, and the bottles lined up across this white-clothed table confirm that everyone here made the respectable choice. The setting — draped curtains behind, a small ice bucket on the table — suggests a banquet room at a hotel or supper club, the kind of venue that in the 1950s got booked for junior proms, graduation dinners, and the sort of organized social occasion that required teenagers to sit at tables and behave like adults for two hours.

The boys have the short-back-and-sides haircuts and open-collar sport shirts that were the universal teenage male uniform of the decade, and the girls are in pastel dresses with clip-on earrings, each assembled with a care that implies they spent considerably longer getting ready than the boys did. Nobody looks miserable, but nobody looks entirely relaxed either, which is about right for an event that is fun in retrospect.

The young man in the foreground has turned to face the camera with the slightly guarded expression of someone who didn't expect to be photographed at that exact moment and hasn't yet decided how he feels about it. The rest of the table is still performing the evening. He already knows he'll be explaining this haircut for decades.

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