Two Children and an Illinois Buick, Early 1950s

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Two Children and an Illinois Buick, Early 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Two Children and an Illinois Buick, Early 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1951–1955

AA-2026-8C22F3

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A boy of about four stands in front of a late-1940s Buick wearing a flat cap and clutching a toy pistol, which in the early 1950s was the respectable accessory for a boy dressed up to go somewhere. The Illinois plate reads 714 049, a detail no one staged, because in that era the family car was simply the backdrop you used when you wanted the children to hold still. His older sister stands beside him in her good wool coat and cat-eye glasses, radiating the particular patience of a child who has been told to stand there and smile and is doing exactly one of those things. Someone decided this was worth a frame of color film — the car, the kids, the parking lot — because documentation was the point, and the event documented was simply that the family had gone somewhere together on a cold day. The boy's pistol will be in a landfill before the decade is out; the Buick will outlast it by a few years at most.

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