Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
AA-2026-BB9A6C
On the image
Two tourists crane their necks at the pediment of the Oklahoma State Capitol, the woman's headscarf and the man's short government-issue haircut placing them squarely in a decade when a trip to the capital city was still dressed for. Someone has framed the shot so the carved letters STATE OF OKLAHOMA float directly above their heads, the amateur photographer's instinct that a big stone building looks more important if a person is standing in front of it looking small.
Nobody in the frame seems to be reading the inscription so much as confirming it is still there, the way visitors to a monument often do, satisfied that the government has, in fact, built itself a suitably Corinthian house. The columns rise in tidy, over-engineered rows behind them, doing the classical-architecture trick of making a relatively young state look two thousand years older and considerably more permanent than it actually is.
Whoever held the camera was not thinking about composition so much as proof: proof of the trip, proof of the building, proof that the vacation had, in fact, included something educational between the motel and the drive home.
The historian's note
The Oklahoma State Capitol in Oklahoma City was completed in 1917, its pedimented, Corinthian-columned facade modeled on the Beaux-Arts state capitols built across the country in the preceding decades. The building has housed the state's legislative and executive offices continuously since its completion, and its dome, notably absent for most of the twentieth century due to budget constraints during World War I, was not added until 2002.
By the 1950s the Capitol was an established stop for visitors to the city, its grounds already known for the working oil wells drilled on the property in the 1940s during a period when oil field development extended even onto government land. The scene here documents an ordinary visit rather than a specific event, part of the broad postwar pattern of Americans touring state capitals as accessible civic landmarks.
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Looking Up at the State Capitol, Oklahoma City, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-BB9A6C. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/looking-up-at-the-state-capitol-oklahoma-city-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026BB9A6C,
title = {Looking Up at the State Capitol, Oklahoma City, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-BB9A6C},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/looking-up-at-the-state-capitol-oklahoma-city-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Looking Up at the State Capitol, Oklahoma City, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-BB9A6C UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/looking-up-at-the-state-capitol-oklahoma-city-1950s ER -
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