Two Girls in Garden Chairs, Backyard Leisure, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Two Girls in Garden Chairs, Backyard Leisure, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Two Girls in Garden Chairs, Backyard Leisure, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-27E1F5

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Sometime in the 1950s, someone decided that a backyard gathering required a certain level of dress, and so one girl arrived in a white ruffled blouse with magenta slacks and the other in a navy gingham dress with a red bow at the waist, both outfits confirming that casual and dressed-up had not yet been fully sorted out as categories. The green tubular-steel lawn furniture beneath them was the standard-issue equipment of postwar American backyards, the kind sold at hardware stores on the theory that leisure was something you could furnish your way into.

The girl on the left has turned toward the camera with an expression that suggests she did not agree to this, while the one on the right has turned away, which amounts to the same thing communicated more efficiently. Between them they have covered both available responses to being photographed at a moment you weren't expecting.

What the scene captures, without trying to, is the particular texture of 1950s childhood leisure: outdoors, dressed up for no clear reason, seated on uncomfortable metal furniture in a well-kept yard, waiting for whatever comes next.

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