Girl Watering Lawn with Garden Hose, Suburban Backyard, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Girl Watering Lawn with Garden Hose, Suburban Backyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Girl Watering Lawn with Garden Hose, Suburban Backyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-7CDD78

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A small girl in a red cardigan and denim shorts has been handed a garden hose and told she is helping, which she believes completely. In the 1950s the American lawn was not decorative but moral — a kept lawn was evidence of a kept family — and so the work of maintaining its uniform green fell to everyone in the household old enough to hold equipment, including people who were approximately four. She is wearing sandals, which will be wet in roughly thirty seconds, and her expression is that of someone who has discovered a superpower. The brass nozzle sends a low arc across St. Augustine grass that is almost aggressively healthy, the kind of turf that required this exact level of dedicated, cheerful, poorly aimed irrigation to stay that way. The photographer — almost certainly a parent, whose shadow falls across the left edge of the frame — has stopped to record the moment as though it were an achievement, and from the child's point of view, it was.

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