Two Girls at the Motel Pool, Summer 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Two Girls at the Motel Pool, Summer 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Two Girls at the Motel Pool, Summer 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1955–1959

AA-2026-9C4B4A

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Two girls stand at the edge of a motel swimming pool on a summer afternoon, both carrying small cameras — a detail that suggests an adult handed them each one and told them to have fun, which was the 1950s theory of vacation. The motel behind them is the new American roadside kind, single-story and sprawling, built for families who had just discovered that a car and two weeks off could get you somewhere worth photographing. Pool chairs are arranged in confident rows that nobody is sitting in, because the point of the pool was to have one, not necessarily to use it. The older girl holds her camera with the focused grip of someone who has been told it is expensive, while the younger one squints into the lens of whoever is taking this picture, performing patience. Both of them are in the frame because someone decided this — the pool, the motel, the fact of being here at all — was worth recording, which it was, though not quite for the reason they thought.

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