Two Children Wading in a Shallow Lake, Rural America, 1950s

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Two Children Wading in a Shallow Lake, Rural America, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Two Children Wading in a Shallow Lake, Rural America, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-29D6ED

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Sometime in the 1950s, two small children — a girl with a stick and a toddler-age boy — were sent to the edge of a shallow inland lake to play, which in that decade meant being turned loose at the waterline with no further supervision and told to have fun. The girl has clearly accepted this mandate and is already conducting some investigation with her stick, the way children did before organised recreation arrived to explain to them what enjoyment was supposed to look like. A flat-bottomed rowboat moored on the far bank confirms that this is the kind of rural American lakeside property where a family spent summers doing things that had no official name — fishing without really fishing, wading without really swimming, existing near water because the water was there. The rot-blackened post to the left is the remains of an old dock or fence line that nobody had gotten around to removing, which was also very much the 1950s approach to infrastructure. The whole scene was photographed by an adult who had decided that two wet children standing in ankle-deep water constituted a moment worth preserving, and they were right, though not for the reason they thought.

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