Three-Generation Family Portrait, Suburban Lawn, 1950s

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Three-Generation Family Portrait, Suburban Lawn, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Three-Generation Family Portrait, Suburban Lawn, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-6AA6D4

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The man has his arms around both women with the casual authority of someone who agreed to this photograph on the condition that it take less than two minutes. His striped open-collar shirt and gold-buckled belt place him precisely in the mid-1950s working-class American weekend — dressed up enough to show respect for the occasion, not so dressed up as to pretend it was something it wasn't.

The younger woman on his left is doing considerably more work for the camera. The white cat-eye sunglasses, the pencil skirt, the coordinated blouse — she had opinions about how this photograph would turn out, and she acted on them. The older woman on his right dressed the way women of her generation dressed for every semi-formal occasion: a composed, buttoned-up competence that required no accessories to explain itself.

Somewhere in the postwar American suburb behind them, young trees are doing their best on a lawn that someone mows with great regularity. The three of them stand on it as though this grass, this street, this modest prosperity is simply the natural order of things — which, in that particular decade, a great many people genuinely believed.

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