Girl on the Bumper, Suburban Driveway, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Girl on the Bumper, Suburban Driveway, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Girl on the Bumper, Suburban Driveway, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1953–1958

AA-2026-C2F5CB

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A young woman leans back against the chrome bumper of a late-1940s sedan parked in a narrow concrete driveway, arms spread along the bumper's width in the easy posture of someone who has been asked to pose with the car and found it a reasonable request. In the 1950s the family car was a genuine point of pride — a thing you photographed the way a later generation would photograph a new kitchen — and posing against it on a summer afternoon was a completely natural way to spend five minutes. The car is a substantial postwar American sedan, painted in the two-tone palette that the era considered the height of taste, and it fills most of the driveway between the brick house wall and the white picket fence with the self-satisfaction of an object that expects to be admired. She is dressed for summer in shorts and a sleeveless striped top, looking down rather than at the camera, which gives the whole scene the slightly accidental quality of someone caught being comfortable rather than performing for posterity. What neither she nor the photographer paused to record is the car itself — make, model, year — because in 1955 everyone already knew what cars looked like, and it seemed impossible they would ever need to be identified.

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