Storm Gathering Over Forested Ridge, 1950s

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Storm Gathering Over Forested Ridge, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Storm Gathering Over Forested Ridge, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-28BD10

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Someone pointed a camera at a darkening ridgeline in the 1950s, which was a thing people did when they owned a camera and a storm was coming and the light briefly did something worth keeping. The conifers along the hill's crest are silhouetted against a sky that has gone the particular deep blue that precedes weather, the kind of blue that in the color-slide era reproduced with a richness that made amateur photographers feel they had done something artistic. They had loaded their camera with color film — an act that still carried novelty and expense in that decade — and they used it on a hillside with no people in it, which suggests the sky was the whole point. In 1950s America, color slide photography was still largely a hobbyist's medium, and the hobbyist's instinct was to shoot what looked dramatic and sort out its meaning later. What they caught was a ridge of trees about to lose the argument with a storm, preserved with the fidelity of Kodachrome at the precise moment before the drama arrived and ruined the composition.

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