Two Children on a Bare Midwestern Hillside, Late Autumn, c. 1958–1965

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Two Children on a Bare Midwestern Hillside, Late Autumn, c. 1958–1965 — Archive & Atlas

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Two Children on a Bare Midwestern Hillside, Late Autumn, c. 1958–1965 — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1957–1959

AA-2026-DFAE8E

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Sometime in the late 1950s, an American family drove out to a high open field on a cold late-autumn day and made the children stand in it for a photograph, which was considered sufficient justification for the trip. The boy is dressed in the miniature-adult style that the era applied to small males — visored cap, zip jacket, dark trousers — the whole outfit signaling that he was already, in principle, a responsible person. His older sister wears a wool coat over jeans with a folded headscarf knotted under her chin, the standard civilian cold-weather uniform of a girl who has been told this will not take long. The rolling, treeless hills behind them and the tawny dormant grass place this somewhere in the interior of the country, the kind of landscape that looks identical from November through March and that no one would have driven to on purpose. Both children are standing exactly as far apart as children stand when they have been positioned by a parent rather than choosing to be near each other. The camera has caught, with complete sincerity, the mid-century belief that putting children outdoors in unflattering weather and pointing a camera at them was a form of memory worth keeping.

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