Baby in Brocade Armchair, Suburban Backyard, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Baby in Brocade Armchair, Suburban Backyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Baby in Brocade Armchair, Suburban Backyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-A1100C

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Someone dragged a full-sized upholstered armchair out onto the backyard lawn, which in the 1950s was considered a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem of where to put a baby for a photograph. The chair — brocade-patterned, built for a living room — sits in the middle of the grass with the mild authority of furniture that has been asked to do something it was not designed for, while the infant perches at its center looking mildly puzzled by the whole arrangement. On the left, a woman crouches at the edge of the frame, the adult designated to catch the child should the plan fail, her role being simultaneously essential and officially invisible. The logic behind moving indoor furniture outside rather than simply holding the baby was that a chair conferred a kind of portrait dignity — it announced that this was a Photograph, not a snapshot — and in postwar America the distinction still mattered enormously. The baby, for its part, appears unconvinced that sitting alone in a brocade throne on a lawn represents any kind of improvement over being held.

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