Toddler on Suburban Sidewalk, American Neighborhood, 1950s

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Toddler on Suburban Sidewalk, American Neighborhood, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Toddler on Suburban Sidewalk, American Neighborhood, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-B56F18

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Sometime in the 1950s, a toddler discovered that running toward a camera while holding something small and yellow was a perfectly complete plan, and the expression on his face suggests he considered it a triumph. The brick ranch houses visible behind him, the neatly clipped boxwood hedges, and the concrete carport all mark this as the American postwar suburb in its confident early years, when the assumption was that a lawn, a driveway, and a healthy child constituted the correct answer to every question civilization had raised. Someone — a parent, almost certainly — crouched down to his level on the front walk and waited for him to close the distance, which he did at full speed, which is why the focus didn't quite catch him. The 1950s suburban snapshot operated on the faith that you pointed the camera at happiness and pressed the button, and that the result would be a record worth keeping. He is blurry, delighted, and completely unaware that in sixty years a stranger will be trying to determine what he was holding.

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