Mountain Stream with Overhanging Deciduous Growth, 1950s

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Mountain Stream with Overhanging Deciduous Growth, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Mountain Stream with Overhanging Deciduous Growth, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-E7AF89

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A clear alpine or mountain stream flows through a narrow gorge where the banks have been allowed to grow wild with deciduous trees and brush, the water itself split into channels by accumulated boulders and sediment. In the 1950s, before the widespread assumption that all waterways needed management and clearing, such scenes were common in the less-trafficked valleys of Europe or North America—places where nobody had yet decided a river ought to look like a canal. The water's blue-green cast suggests either mineral content or depth, and the rocks show the kind of weathered accumulation that takes decades of spring floods to arrange. Somebody with a color camera and time to spend on a landscape—a photographer, perhaps a hiker with serious equipment—stood at this bank and recorded what appeared to be simply the way nature looked when left to its own devices. The photograph is a period document of a time when that was still possible.

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