AA-2026-690598
On the image
Sometime in the 1950s, a homeowner built a two-car detached garage and then photographed it — doors open, both bays occupied — in the manner of a man who had accomplished something and wanted a record of it. The structure itself is straightforward clapboard construction, freshly painted, the kind of outbuilding that said you had arrived at a specific American life: one where you owned two cars and had somewhere permanent to put them.
The cars pulled nose-in are a matched pair of what appear to be late-1950s American full-size sedans, their broad chrome rear fins and wrap-around tail lamps facing the camera like a declaration. This was the decade when the automobile was not transportation so much as biography, and keeping two of them under one roof, on a gravel drive beneath mature oaks going gold in autumn, was the whole point of the picture.
The garage has no overhead doors — just open bays — which by the late 1950s was already a slightly dated arrangement; the motorized roll-up door was becoming standard. The man who built this thought he had solved the problem permanently, which is exactly what people think when they have just solved the problem.
Visually related — by likeness
Two-Car Garage with Postwar American Sedans, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-690598. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-car-garage-with-postwar-american-sedans-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026690598,
title = {Two-Car Garage with Postwar American Sedans, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-690598},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-car-garage-with-postwar-american-sedans-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Two-Car Garage with Postwar American Sedans, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-690598 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-car-garage-with-postwar-american-sedans-1950s ER -
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