Man and Snow-Covered Ford Customline, Residential Driveway, 1950s Winter

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Man and Snow-Covered Ford Customline, Residential Driveway, 1950s Winter — Archive & Atlas

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Man and Snow-Covered Ford Customline, Residential Driveway, 1950s Winter — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-FD66FA

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Somewhere in the American Northeast, a man has just dug out his Ford Customline after a substantial snowfall and paused — door open, one hand on the roof — in the particular posture of someone who has completed an enormous amount of work and wants a witness. The car still wears several inches of snow on its trunk and roofline, which suggests either that he stopped clearing it prematurely or that he is the kind of man who considers the windshield the only truly mandatory surface. The Customline was Ford's bread-and-butter two-door sedan for much of the mid-1950s, a car sold to people who wanted to drive somewhere practical rather than make a statement, and in that respect it suited this driveway perfectly. Behind the chain-link fence the neighbourhood sits under the same even white coat that made every errand that morning feel like an expedition. In 1950s suburban America, the ability to get your car out of the driveway after a storm was treated as a minor test of character, and this man appears to have passed — or at least passed enough.

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