Two children on picnic table, 1950s rural landscape

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Two children on picnic table, 1950s rural landscape — Archive & Atlas

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Two children on picnic table, 1950s rural landscape — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-6A2247

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Two children stand on a picnic table in an open field, dressed in dark coats and posed as if for a formal portrait, facing the camera with the blank expression of kids who have been told to hold still. Behind them stretches a flat agricultural landscape and distant treeline under an overcast sky. Someone has decided that a picnic table in the middle of nowhere is the right setting for a photograph, which meant driving out here, arranging the children on the bench, and asking them to stand on top of it rather than sit like normal people would. The composition treats the vast empty field as backdrop rather than subject, as though the point of the photograph was not the place itself but the document of having brought these two children to this particular nowhere and made them stand there, a practice that required no explanation or justification at the time.

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