Toddler and a White Metal Patio Chair, Backyard Flash Photo, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Toddler and a White Metal Patio Chair, Backyard Flash Photo, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Toddler and a White Metal Patio Chair, Backyard Flash Photo, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-1B9E54

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The chair was the kind of thing a 1950s hardware store sold by the pair, stamped steel bent into a shape somebody in a design office decided looked cheerful, painted white so it would show up in exactly this kind of nighttime flash photograph. It has done its job here mostly as a prop and a handhold, something for a one-year-old to grip while learning that standing upright is possible and staying upright is optional.

The household clearly owned a flashbulb camera and clearly intended to use it after dark, which in this era meant marching a small child out into the yard, propping her by the furniture, and trusting that the bulb would do what daylight usually did for free. The result is a child lit like a specimen against a wall of black hedge, mid-sentence, unaware that she is the only part of the scene the exposure was built around.

Nobody thought to move the chair's little fold-out shelf out of frame, because nobody in 1950s home photography thought about frames at all. The picture was for the album, not for judging, and by that standard it succeeded completely.

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