Family Christmas Portrait, Living Room, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Family Christmas Portrait, Living Room, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Family Christmas Portrait, Living Room, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1953–1959

AA-2026-DAC2CB

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A family of four has arranged itself around a blond-wood coffee table for a Christmas portrait, the older boy wearing a clip-on bow tie that marks this as a formal occasion by 1950s standards. The tree behind them is decorated in the period's preferred style: every branch flocked or strewn with silver icicles and lit with fat colored bulbs, so dense with ornament it reads less as a tree than as an announcement. On the coffee table sit two tall parfait glasses, already used, and a beer can that no one thought to move before the shutter was pressed, because in the 1950s a beer can in a Christmas photo was simply furniture. The father has the careful posture of a man who considers sitting still for a camera a minor civic duty, and the mother's expression confirms she has been performing competence since approximately 1947. The older boy is the only one smiling, which is either because he is too young to understand the obligation of a neutral expression in a serious portrait, or because he is the only one who has correctly assessed what Christmas morning is actually for.

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