Three Girls Outside a Chateau-Style Brick Institution, USA, 1950s

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Three Girls Outside a Chateau-Style Brick Institution, USA, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Three Girls Outside a Chateau-Style Brick Institution, USA, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-EAC068

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Three girls in their best casual wear — which in the 1950s meant cuffed slacks, plaid shirts, and white ankle socks with saddle shoes worn with the conviction of a dress code — have stopped on a sidewalk to be photographed in front of what is clearly a building that takes itself seriously. The structure behind them is a large chateau-influenced brick pile with a green mansard roof, dormers, and corner turrets, the kind of architecture a city commissioned around the turn of the century to communicate permanence and civic dignity, and that by the 1950s had become simply the backdrop of ordinary Midwestern life. The tallest girl stands at the center with the composed authority of someone who has been put in charge of the other two, an arrangement the other two appear to accept as reasonable. A late-1940s American sedan parked across the road completes the sense of a country in the middle of its most confident decade, confident enough to dress its children in matching color schemes for a casual Tuesday. What none of them seem aware of is that the building behind them is doing most of the posing.

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