Girl with German Shepherd by Mountain Lake, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Girl with German Shepherd by Mountain Lake, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Girl with German Shepherd by Mountain Lake, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-127EC9

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A girl in a white off-shoulder dress sits at the edge of a clear mountain lake with a German Shepherd leaning contentedly against her, and someone behind a camera decided this was the perfect composition for a summer afternoon — the good dress, the good dog, the good water. In the 1950s the German Shepherd occupied a peculiar cultural position: war dog, police dog, Rin Tin Tin dog, and somehow also the ideal backdrop for a child portrait, simultaneously proof of wholesome outdoor life and the family's sound judgment in pets. The dress is the telling detail — white, ruffled, the kind of garment whose appearance at a lakeside suggests a parent's optimism triumphing over experience, since the dog is already damp and the bank is already muddy. She is looking down at the dog with the relaxed smile of someone who has entirely forgotten she is wearing good clothes, which is exactly the expression that makes the whole exercise worthwhile. The dog, for its part, looks like it has been sitting for portraits its entire life and finds the arrangement perfectly reasonable.

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