Couple at Picnic Table, Backyard or Park, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Couple at Picnic Table, Backyard or Park, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Couple at Picnic Table, Backyard or Park, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1952–1959

AA-2026-1BDFBB

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A man and woman sit together on the bench of a painted picnic table in what is plainly a summer afternoon, dressed the way middle-class Americans dressed for leisure in the 1950s — which is to say, more formally than anyone would bother today. He has rested one foot on a basketball sitting in the grass, the casual prop of a man who wanted to look relaxed without actually doing anything athletic. The aluminum folding chair beside them, in its turquoise canvas and tubular frame, was the era's shorthand for outdoor sophistication, a piece of furniture so ubiquitous it appeared at every cookout from Levittown to Los Angeles without anyone finding that suspicious. Someone has called for them to look at the camera, and they have complied with the mild, patient expressions of people who understood that being photographed was a small civic duty you performed on holidays. The basketball, the folding chair, and the good clothes together describe a generation that had not yet worked out the difference between going outside and going somewhere.

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