First Communion, Postwar Subdivision, 1950s

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First Communion, Postwar Subdivision, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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First Communion, Postwar Subdivision, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1953–1959

AA-2026-1E9E02

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A girl of about seven stands on a front lawn in her First Communion dress and veil, posed for the neighborhood record before the family drives to Mass. The postwar American suburb had delivered on its promise — a brick ranch house, a concrete driveway, grass trimmed to a uniform crew cut — and the Catholic ritual of First Communion had adapted to it perfectly, treating the front yard as a stage between the sacred occasion and the ordinary street. The dress, with its full skirt and puffed sleeves, was rented or sewn for a single morning and would spend the next forty years in a box. She stands very still in the way of children who have been told the dress is not to be touched, which is to say she is being careful with something she does not yet understand is already a memory.

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