Girl in Party Dress, Living Room Portrait, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Girl in Party Dress, Living Room Portrait, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Girl in Party Dress, Living Room Portrait, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-35D922

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A girl of about seven or eight stands in the living room wearing a blue taffeta dress with lace collar and cuffs, one fist raised at shoulder height in the slightly stiff pose of a child told to stand still and smile but not quite managing either. In the 1950s, dressing a daughter up and photographing her in the good room was itself the occasion — the dress was the event, the living room the stage, the camera the audience. Behind her, centered on the striped wallpaper with the deliberateness of someone who had given the matter real thought, hangs a framed floral print of the kind sold in department stores across postwar America as the finishing touch a modern home required. The furniture is kept out of frame except for the arm of a chair, because the point was never the room — it was the dress, the curled hair, the lipstick someone had applied to make her look ready for something. She looks directly into the camera with the expression of a child who has been told this is important and is taking that seriously, which is the most 1950s thing in the frame.

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