Girl in Backyard, Jeans and Ruffled Blouse, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Girl in Backyard, Jeans and Ruffled Blouse, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Girl in Backyard, Jeans and Ruffled Blouse, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-A0FEF0

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Sometime in the 1950s, someone decided this girl needed to be photographed in the backyard, and she agreed to it the way children agree to things — with visible reservations. She is wearing the decade's central contradiction: dark denim jeans with a wide western belt buckle, paired with a ruffled white blouse that belongs to an entirely different occasion. The combination was not unusual. The fifties had not yet decided whether little girls should dress like cowgirls or like guests at a tea party, so the practical answer was frequently both at once.

Behind her, a white metal wire chair sits empty on the grass against a weathered board fence, the kind of cheap tubular patio furniture that arrived in American backyards in the postwar years when the concept of 'outdoor living' was being sold to a generation that had spent the Depression indoors. Nobody is sitting in it, which means it is doing its real job: signaling that this family had a backyard worth furnishing.

She holds her hands at her waist and squints into the sun with the expression of someone who has been told this will only take a second. She is still waiting.

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