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Man on Rocky Outcrop, Chihuahuan Desert Highlands, mid-1950s — Archive & Atlas
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mid 1950s

Man on Rocky Outcrop, Chihuahuan Desert Highlands, mid-1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1953–1958

AA-2026-5BA57F

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Standing on a limestone shelf above a Chihuahuan Desert basin, a man in a collared work shirt and khakis has taken up the pose that American men of the 1950s considered the correct way to be photographed outdoors: facing away from the camera at a three-quarter angle, gazing into the middle distance as though he has just thought of something important. The yucca at his feet and the flat-topped escarpment behind him place this firmly in the Big Bend country or the Davis Mountains of West Texas, a region that in the mid-1950s was beginning to attract the kind of organized leisure tourism that required a slide projector and an audience of neighbors.

The trip almost certainly had a practical frame — a driving vacation, a fishing detour, a geology enthusiast's weekend — because in that era men did not simply wander the desert for aesthetic reasons without a stated purpose. His gloves tucked in one hand suggest he came prepared for scrambling, which is to say he had thought about the terrain more than most.

What the camera caught was a man who had driven a very long way to stand on a rock and look at more rocks, and who was entirely satisfied with this decision.

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Archive & Atlas — The Archive AA-2026-5BA57F · jpg · Open