Children at a Park Picnic, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Children at a Park Picnic, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Children at a Park Picnic, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-FC5FB3

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A boy of about ten stands in the foreground of a public park, dressed in a white shirt and blue shorts with white cuffs, holding a beach ball striped in primary colors. Behind him, scattered across the grass beneath large shade trees, other children and adults occupy themselves with the business of a midday picnic: laying out blankets, sitting in folding chairs, minding younger siblings. The boy looks toward the camera with the blank confidence of a child who has been told to stand still for a photograph and sees no reason to smile about it. His shorts and socks, his haircut, the deliberate way adults have arranged themselves on the lawn in the middle of the day—all of it belonged to a time when a park was somewhere a family went in order to sit down together in public and call it leisure. He holds the ball as though it mattered, because then it did: a toy, a game, proof the outing was special. Nobody here seems to be doing anything in particular, which is exactly what they came to do.

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