Girl with Fan, Front Parlor, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Girl with Fan, Front Parlor, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Girl with Fan, Front Parlor, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1953–1959

AA-2026-AA247A

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A girl of about ten sits in the good chair — the one in the front parlor that existed primarily to be sat in correctly for photographs. She is wearing white lounging pajamas with red embroidered slippers and holding a small folding fan, which in the 1950s was still a souvenir category that American households took seriously, the residue of a postwar fascination with Japan that expressed itself in lacquerware, paper fans, and pink ceramic poodles, one of which stands on the tiered end table behind her. Someone has arranged this scene: the chair, the child, the fan, the good carpet that ran wall to wall in every house that could afford to say so. She looks directly at the camera with the patient expression of a child who has been told to hold still and is holding still, doing her part in the family project of recording prosperity.

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