Toddler in Wooden High Chair After Mealtime, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Toddler in Wooden High Chair After Mealtime, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Toddler in Wooden High Chair After Mealtime, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-5EA10D

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Somewhere in postwar America, a toddler has just finished a meal in the way toddlers finish meals — which is to say the food is now mostly on his face and shirt rather than inside him, and he appears entirely satisfied with this outcome. The solid wood high chair he occupies is the kind of heavy, no-nonsense piece of American domestic furniture that parents of the 1950s bought on the assumption it would last long enough to seat their grandchildren, which it probably did. Someone decided this was the moment to reach for the camera, operating on the 1950s parental theory that a child covered in food was a child thriving, and that thriving children should be documented, and that the resulting colour snapshots would be treasured forever. The baby's expression — direct, calm, completely unbothered by the evidence of chaos across his face — suggests he grasps the situation more clearly than anyone: he ate, he made a mess, and now there will be a photograph, and this is simply how things work.

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