Alaskan Glacier
AA-2026-AD9AD9
On the image
Standing at the terminal moraine of an Alaskan glacier in 1958, a woman holds a small child against her coat and faces one of the largest things either of them will ever see up close. The serrated ice wall behind them — crevassed towers of compressed glacier pushing down toward the rock — is the kind of spectacle that postwar American tourism had just started to reach, as Alaska inched toward statehood and the cruise and charter industry began pointing cameras at what had previously been considered merely remote.
The logic of the pose is very much of its era: you proved you had been somewhere by standing in front of it. The glacier was the backdrop, the family was the subject, and the correct distance from the ice was whatever allowed both to fit in the frame. That the glacier was actively calving, structurally unstable, and considerably more impressive without anyone standing in front of it was not the point.
Alaska became the 49th state the following year, and these glaciers would spend the next several decades slowly retreating from the spots where tourists had stood to be photographed in front of them. The ice wall she is facing is, in all likelihood, no longer there.
Visually related — by likeness
Mother and Child at Alaskan Glacier Face, 1958. 1958. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-AD9AD9. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/mother-and-child-at-alaskan-glacier-face-1958.
@misc{aaAA2026AD9AD9,
title = {Mother and Child at Alaskan Glacier Face, 1958},
year = {1958},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-AD9AD9},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/mother-and-child-at-alaskan-glacier-face-1958}
}TY - ART TI - Mother and Child at Alaskan Glacier Face, 1958 PY - 1958 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-AD9AD9 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/mother-and-child-at-alaskan-glacier-face-1958 ER -
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