Two Girls Pose With the New Window Air Conditioner, 1950s

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Two Girls Pose With the New Window Air Conditioner, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Two Girls Pose With the New Window Air Conditioner, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-C4AE91

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Two girls — a younger one in a blue skirt and crop top, an older one in a dark two-piece playsuit — stand on either side of a window-mounted air conditioning unit, clasping hands across its grille as though presenting a trophy. The walls are painted an optimistic turquoise, the kind of color that in the 1950s signaled a household fully committed to postwar modernity. The air conditioner itself, a boxy window unit with a round grille and a cord coiled on the floor below it, was still a genuine luxury for most American families in this decade, and someone decided the occasion warranted a photograph. The girls are performing a kind of domestic ceremony, marking the arrival of a machine that their parents probably regarded as life-changing and that they will one day describe to their own children as primitive. Every era has its monument to progress, and for this household, on this summer day, it was bolted into a window frame.

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