Three Generations of Women, Rural Europe, 1950s

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Three Generations of Women, Rural Europe, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Three Generations of Women, Rural Europe, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-2EAA19

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Someone lined them up by age, which is what families did before anyone thought to ask if the subjects wanted to be lined up by age. The oldest woman stands in unrelieved black at one end, the custom of widowhood requiring a woman to dress for mourning long after the occasion for it, and the row runs forward through gray and floral print to the youngest child in white at the other, as if age itself were a costume with a dress code.

The light is failing and nobody in 1950s rural Europe owned a flash powerful enough to argue with dusk, so the photographer took what the evening gave him and let the background go to black. A stone pedestal looms behind them, maybe a shrine, maybe a well head, the kind of structure that had stood in that courtyard since before anyone present was born and would go on being ignored by everyone in every family photo taken there after this one.

Every woman has arranged her hands the same patient way, the pose of people who understand that portraits are rare and therefore serious, worth the discomfort of standing still in your good dress while the light runs out. The two small girls look unconvinced by the whole enterprise, one sucking a thumb, the other gripping a hand, both too young yet to know that this picture, of all the ordinary evenings of their childhood, is the one that will outlast them.

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