Graduation Day Portrait, Mortarboard and Pink Tassel, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Graduation Day Portrait, Mortarboard and Pink Tassel, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Graduation Day Portrait, Mortarboard and Pink Tassel, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-F8E84F

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She is smiling the specific smile of someone who has just been told, repeatedly and for years, that this cap and gown represent the end of one long obligation and the start of another. The mortarboard sits slightly too far forward, the way rented academic wear always did, sized by a committee rather than a tailor, with a pink tassel added so that everyone in the crowd could tell the girls from the boys at fifty feet.

Behind her the cars are parked on the grass in the loose, permissive way that only a small campus ceremony allowed, back when a lawn was still considered adequate parking if the occasion was important enough. Somewhere out of frame a program was being read aloud, names in alphabetical order, diplomas rolled and tied with ribbon like something that needed protecting from the weather.

Nobody in 1950s America photographed a graduate for the graduate's benefit. The picture existed so a mother could hold it up later and say, without needing to add anything else, that the money had been well spent.

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