Easter Sunday Family Portrait, Suburban Midwest USA, 1950s

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Easter Sunday Family Portrait, Suburban Midwest USA, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Easter Sunday Family Portrait, Suburban Midwest USA, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-F36763

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Four members of a midwestern family have stepped outside after church on what is almost certainly Easter Sunday, the one occasion in the 1950s calendar that required every person over the age of six to wear a hat, regardless of whether they owned a head suited to one. The older woman on the left has solved this problem with a navy straw confection anchored by silk flowers and has further signalled the occasion with a corsage pinned to her coat, which was the era's way of letting everyone at the service know she had a family that remembered her. The elderly man in the double-breasted suit and broad-brimmed fedora carries himself with the quiet authority of someone who has been dressing for church since before anyone in the group was born, and who regards the whole exercise of being photographed outdoors as a reasonable obligation. The two younger women, each in a small tilted fascinator, have achieved the precise 1950s compromise between fashionable and appropriate that required months of department-store reconnaissance. They are standing in front of a white clapboard bungalow in a neighborhood of identical white clapboard bungalows, a setting that in this decade represented not monotony but the successful conclusion of a life's ambition.

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