Children's Birthday Party, Living Room, USA, 1950s

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Children's Birthday Party, Living Room, USA, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Children's Birthday Party, Living Room, USA, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-65AB96

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Somewhere in middle-class America in the 1950s, a small birthday cake with two candles sits on a child-sized red table, and the girl whose birthday it presumably is has her back to the camera, which suggests the parent with the camera arrived at exactly the wrong moment or possibly the right one. The boy across the table, in a red pullover, is watching the camera with the particular expression of a child who has been near a cake for several minutes without being allowed to touch it. Behind them a console television with a rounded picture tube sits dark and silent, which in this decade meant either the party was important enough to turn the set off — a genuine sacrifice — or it was daytime and there was nothing on worth watching anyway. The floral curtains, the eyelet-trimmed party dress, and the child-sized furniture all belong to an era when a birthday for a two-year-old was treated as a formal domestic occasion requiring a fully iced bakery cake and everyone's best clothes. The boy's expression says he has been patient long enough.

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