Three Girls with New Bicycles, Suburban Backyard, 1950s

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Three Girls with New Bicycles, Suburban Backyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Three Girls with New Bicycles, Suburban Backyard, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-ECFA3E

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Three girls stand in a suburban backyard with two brand-new blue bicycles, and the whole scene has the barely-contained energy of Christmas morning or a birthday that has just delivered exactly what was asked for. The bikes are the kind of balloon-tire cruisers that American manufacturers turned out by the millions in the postwar decade, when a bicycle was still the outer limit of a child's personal territory and ownership of one was understood to confer a small but serious kind of freedom. The middle girl, older than the other two and dressed in navy as though the occasion called for it, is inspecting something on the handlebars with the proprietary focus of someone who has already decided this one is hers. The youngest, in a full-skirted dress that was plainly not chosen with bicycle-riding in mind, is holding the other bike's handlebar with the careful optimism of a child who has not yet been told to change her clothes first. Behind them the Monday washing hangs on the line, and the lawn furniture sits at the edge of the frame, indifferent to the milestone being conducted in front of it — which is what ordinary afternoons do when they accidentally become the ones people remember.

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