Snowball Fight, Residential Courtyard, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Snowball Fight, Residential Courtyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Snowball Fight, Residential Courtyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-F96EAB

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Two women are conducting a snowball fight with the full commitment of people who have just discovered that adulthood contains no actual rule against this. One is already bracing for impact; the other is mid-throw, grinning, wearing jeans and rubber galoshes because she planned ahead and her opponent, in a wool coat and stockings, did not. The gap in their preparation tells the whole story of how the fight started and how it will end.

Behind them a clipped boxwood hedge and a pair of ornamental lantern posts mark the entrance to what looks like a postwar garden-apartment complex — the kind of two-story brick development that appeared across American suburbs in the early 1950s, designed for young families and returnees who wanted something between a house and a hotel. The building is completely indifferent to the chaos in front of it.

The 1950s had a complicated relationship with women behaving like this in public — undignified, athletic, openly delighted — and whoever was holding the camera clearly thought it was worth documenting. The woman in stockings almost certainly regretted her footwear before the afternoon was over.

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