Man in Dress Shirt and Tie with St. Bernard Mix, Suburban Backyard, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Man in Dress Shirt and Tie with St. Bernard Mix, Suburban Backyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Man in Dress Shirt and Tie with St. Bernard Mix, Suburban Backyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-320D37

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A man in his sixties stands in a suburban backyard wearing a dress shirt, blue tie, and slacks — the full Sunday-best ensemble — which in the 1950s was simply what men wore around the house if there was any possibility of being photographed. He is looking down at a large St. Bernard mix on a leash, not with affection exactly, but with the evaluating expression of a man who has accepted this dog as a permanent resident of the property and is making his peace with it. Behind him, a row of mature trees has grown tall enough to nearly engulf the clapboard house, the kind of horticultural triumph that takes a decade and then suddenly becomes someone else's problem to prune. The whole scene has the quality of a Sunday afternoon when nothing was happening and someone decided that a man and a dog standing near a fence was worth preserving — and they were right, because it turns out that men in ties standing in backyards with large dogs is exactly the kind of thing that stops happening and then you miss it.

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