Toddler in Wooden High Chair After Mealtime, 1950s

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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-CC38F2

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A small blond boy in a wooden high chair has just finished a meal by the method toddlers have always preferred, which is to apply a significant portion of it directly to his face, and he is delighted with the results. In the 1950s, the wooden high chair was standard American domestic equipment, solid and institutional, the kind of object that suggested a baby's eating arrangements deserved the same engineering confidence as a piece of furniture for adults. Someone — almost certainly his mother — reached for the camera at the precise moment he was most thoroughly decorated with his lunch, which tells you everything about why the snapshot camera became the central technology of postwar family life: it turned the mess into the memory. He grips what appears to be a spoon strap with the satisfaction of a man who has completed a difficult project. The grin says he knows exactly how this looks and has correctly calculated that it will not get him into trouble.

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