Backyard Cookout, Charcoal Grill and Wax Cups, United States, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Backyard Cookout, Charcoal Grill and Wax Cups, United States, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Backyard Cookout, Charcoal Grill and Wax Cups, United States, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-F31412

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Barefoot on a patch of dirt with a paper cup of something cold at his feet, the young man perched on a yellow bucket is doing what American men in the 1950s had recently decided was their ancestral birthright: presiding over fire and meat outdoors. The charcoal grill behind him is sending up a column of smoke that everyone has accepted as normal, because the postwar backyard cookout was the decade's great democratic ritual and a little smoke in the face was the price of belonging.

The woman to the right is already watching the grill with the focused attention of someone who knows the chicken will burn if left to the presiders. The rest of the group crouches in that comfortable, temporary way that says this is a lakeside or riverside campsite rather than a suburban yard — trees, bare soil, water-light in the background — which meant hauling everything in, including the grill and the ice and the wax cups, as a deliberate act of leisure.

At some point in the 1950s Americans concluded that eating outdoors over open coals was not roughing it but upgrading, and they committed to that belief with the full force of the consumer economy behind them.

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