Girl in Sunday Best, Living Room Portrait, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Girl in Sunday Best, Living Room Portrait, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Girl in Sunday Best, Living Room Portrait, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1953–1959

AA-2026-212DB2

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A girl of about ten stands in the living room in her good dress, holding a small yellow flower at her waist with the careful grip of someone who has been told to hold it and not let it droop. The occasion was almost certainly Easter — the dress, the pearl necklace, the flower, the fact that someone thought to get out the camera all point the same direction. In the 1950s, Easter was one of the handful of days a year when a child was dressed to a specific standard and then stationed in the best room of the house to be documented before anything could go wrong. The room itself is doing its own version of the same performance: two armchairs that would not normally be sat in quite this formally, a lamp, a floral painting, everything arranged in the settled conviction that this was what a proper living room looked like. She is smiling with the patience of a child who has been smiling for slightly longer than she expected to.

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