AA-2026-929F8F
On the image
A sunny clearing dotted with daisies sprawls beneath dark timber, the kind of unmanaged woodland edge that still existed in rural America when nobody saw profit in cleaning it up. The white flowers scattered across the grass suggest early summer, or at least the season when someone thought the meadow worth photographing. Behind them the forest closes in almost black, making the bright field appear as a small, temporary reprieve from the surrounding woods—the sort of place where children might have played or a family might have picnicked on a Saturday afternoon, assuming the midges weren't too bad. The scene carries no human presence and no visible improvement; it is simply what was there, waiting for the color film stock to arrive.
The historian's note
This scene documents the appearance of managed or semi-wild grassland in temperate North America during the 1950s, a landscape type that existed in abundance across rural regions. The composition and color rendering are consistent with Kodachrome or Ektachrome slide film, the standard color documentary medium of the decade. Such meadows—often created and maintained through light grazing or periodic cutting—formed a transitional zone between field and forest that was ordinary enough to escape special documentation, making photographs of undifferentiated natural scenes comparatively rare in the archive.
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Meadow with Daisies and Forest Edge, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-929F8F. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/meadow-with-daisies-and-forest-edge-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026929F8F,
title = {Meadow with Daisies and Forest Edge, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-929F8F},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/meadow-with-daisies-and-forest-edge-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Meadow with Daisies and Forest Edge, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-929F8F UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/meadow-with-daisies-and-forest-edge-1950s ER -
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