Feeding Gulls from a Passenger Ferry Deck, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Feeding Gulls from a Passenger Ferry Deck, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Feeding Gulls from a Passenger Ferry Deck, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-86491C

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Somewhere on a broad inland waterway in the 1950s, a girl in a green coat leans over a varnished ferry railing and hand-feeds a seagull, which has arrived close enough to blur with motion, proving it has done this before and considers tourists a reliable food source. The man beside her in a fedora and sport coat faces the water with the composed indifference of someone who has already had his moment with the gulls and found it sufficient. Feeding birds from a moving vessel was one of those activities that every postwar family treated as spontaneous and every gull treated as scheduled. The ferry itself — white rails, teak cap, the wide-open promenade deck — suggests a respectable passenger service of the kind that in the 1950s still operated as though the automobile had not quite won. The girl's outstretched hand and the gull frozen mid-grab are the whole transaction: she believed she was befriending wildlife, and the gull was simply collecting a toll.

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