Couple Posing with Postwar Sedan, American Suburban Street, 1950s

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Couple Posing with Postwar Sedan, American Suburban Street, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Couple Posing with Postwar Sedan, American Suburban Street, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-C5D9DE

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A man and woman lean against a dark blue postwar American sedan with the relaxed confidence of people who have recently acquired something worth leaning against, which in the 1950s meant a car with enough chrome and swept steel to signal that things were going well. Behind them, a tidy Cape Cod cottage with blue shutters sits on a street of newly built houses spaced just far enough apart to suggest a subdivision still finding its rhythm — the kind of American neighborhood that did not exist a decade earlier and would be completely full a decade later. The woman has dressed for the occasion in a dark blouse with earrings and a brooch, because being photographed beside the car was an occasion, the car being the clearest proof available that the postwar bargain — work hard, buy things, pose beside them — was paying off. The man's short-sleeved sport shirt and belt say weekend, but his posture says he knows exactly why the camera is pointing at the car as much as at him. The whole scene is a document of a moment when Americans believed, with complete sincerity, that a new house and a new car parked in front of it constituted a philosophical position.

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