Infant in Plaid Folding Lawn Chair, Backyard, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Infant in Plaid Folding Lawn Chair, Backyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Infant in Plaid Folding Lawn Chair, Backyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-28C444

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Sometime in the 1950s, an American family solved the problem of where to put the baby during a backyard gathering by setting it in a folding lawn chair — the tubular aluminum kind with plaid canvas webbing that every suburban household owned and that collapsed unexpectedly at least once per summer. The baby, perhaps four to six months old, sits propped at a slight recline and regards the adult pointing the camera with an expression that lands somewhere between mild curiosity and the beginning of a complaint.

The lawn chair as infant furniture was a confident improvisation of the era, born from the postwar conviction that American ingenuity could be applied to any domestic problem. There were no specialized outdoor infant seats, and a blanket on the grass was apparently considered insufficiently formal. The solution was to wedge the child into the adult furniture and photograph the result as though this proved something.

The well-kept suburban grass, the dappled afternoon shade, and the slightly overhead angle all suggest a proud parent standing over the scene certain this was exactly the kind of moment worth preserving. It was, in the end, though not quite for the reasons they imagined.

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