Girl Holding Kittens, Suburban Backyard, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Girl Holding Kittens, Suburban Backyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Girl Holding Kittens, Suburban Backyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-BDC1A1

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Sometime in the 1950s, a girl in a sleeveless pink shirtwaist dress stood in a suburban backyard and tried to hold two young kittens at once, which is the kind of project that always seems more manageable before you start. One kitten is already negotiating its escape, its pink nose pointed toward open air, its back legs pushing against nothing in particular. The dress itself is worth noting — buttoned, collared, entirely presentable — because 1950s children were sent outdoors in clothes that assumed the outdoors would cooperate.

The family car is visible in the soft background beyond the garden plantings, parked with the unhurried permanence of a decade when the driveway was a natural extension of domestic life. Nobody in this yard thought anything unusual was happening.

What the camera caught was the standard proposition of children and small animals: the child believes she is in charge, and the kitten has not yet formed an opinion on this, but is forming one.

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