Backyard Wading Pool, Three Boys, American Suburb, 1950s

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Backyard Wading Pool, Three Boys, American Suburb, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Backyard Wading Pool, Three Boys, American Suburb, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-077C17

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Every American suburb in the 1950s arrived with the same unwritten contract: a modest yard, a garden hose, and the reasonable expectation that summer could be managed at home. The yellow rubber wading pool, shallow enough to be disappointing to anyone over age five, was the decade's answer to the country club, and it worked on approximately the same principle — you got wet and felt you'd accomplished something.

Three boys have convened around it on what is plainly a hot afternoon, the garden hose snaking in from somewhere near the outbuilding to keep the water fresh. One is directing a stream of water with the focused satisfaction of a small person who has briefly been given authority over something, while the standing boy surveys the operation with his back to the camera in the classic posture of a foreman who has not yet decided what needs fixing.

The vegetable garden fenced along the back of the yard dates the whole enterprise as precisely as anything in the frame — this is the era when a kitchen garden was still considered the responsible use of a backyard rather than an eccentric hobby. The pool, the hose, the garden, the white outbuilding: collectively they describe a postwar American domestic life that was extremely confident about what a good summer afternoon was supposed to look like.

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