Dressed for an Occasion, Suburban Backyard, 1950s

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Dressed for an Occasion, Suburban Backyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Dressed for an Occasion, Suburban Backyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-BE44B5

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Easter Sunday, or a wedding, or possibly just a Sunday in the 1950s when getting properly dressed still meant something — the couple standing in this backyard have coordinated their navy blue with the kind of unconscious precision that decades of marriage either produce or prevent. She has done it correctly: the small pillbox hat, white gloves held rather than worn, a handbag on the wrist, heels on grass. He has put on his dark suit and his best posture, which turns out to be the same posture as his everyday posture.

The chain-link fence behind them and the aging clapboard neighbor's house beyond it locate this firmly in the working- and middle-class American suburbs of the Eisenhower years, when the aspiration was a lawn you owned and clothes that proved you knew what to do with it. The whole aesthetic was deeply serious about the distinction between dressed and undressed, a distinction that would largely dissolve within fifteen years.

She leans in slightly and glances at him; he faces the camera with the expression of a man who has been photographed before and considers it a formality. The occasion, whatever it was, clearly required them to stand in the yard first and be documented.

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