AA-2026-BD8A65
On the image
Sometime in the postwar decade, a man and a woman are being towed across a broad inland lake behind a motorboat, each on their own tow rope, upright and steady in the way that suggests they have done this before and intend to look casual about it. Water-skiing had arrived in American leisure culture with the conviction that speed plus summer equals the good life, and by the 1950s a motorboat and a pair of wooden skis were the clearest possible signal that a family had arrived — not financially, exactly, but spiritually, in the sense of having assembled the correct props for a modern outdoor weekend. The man rides in light trousers, bare-chested, with the relaxed posture of someone who would describe this as 'nothing really,' and the woman leans slightly into the wake in a two-piece swimsuit, both of them trailing white rooster-tails across water that is the deep blue of a lake ringed with pine forest, the kind of landscape that puts the scene somewhere in the upper Midwest or the Great Lakes region. Someone in the boat thought to turn around and take the picture, which meant letting go of something in order to do it, and the resulting composition — two small human figures geometrically centered between converging white wakes — accidentally produced the most impressive argument for recreational boating that the era's tourism boards could not have staged better if they had tried.
Visually related — by likeness
Couples Water-Skiing on an American Lake, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-BD8A65. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/couples-water-skiing-on-an-american-lake-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026BD8A65,
title = {Couples Water-Skiing on an American Lake, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-BD8A65},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/couples-water-skiing-on-an-american-lake-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Couples Water-Skiing on an American Lake, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-BD8A65 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/couples-water-skiing-on-an-american-lake-1950s ER -
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