Two Men Below Bok Tower, Lake Wales, Florida, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Two Men Below Bok Tower, Lake Wales, Florida, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Two Men Below Bok Tower, Lake Wales, Florida, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-F21F88

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Two men in T-shirts and dungarees stand on a manicured lawn in the subtropical shade of slash pines and sabal palms, the kind of posture — one hand on hip, the other hanging loose — that Americans adopted whenever someone pointed a camera at them on vacation and said to look natural. Behind them, rising through the canopy, the Gothic Revival marble shaft of Bok Tower in Lake Wales, Florida pushes into the frame, its vertical fluting echoing the tall straight pines as though the whole landscape had agreed on a theme. Edward Bok built the carillon tower in 1929 on the highest point in peninsular Florida — a distinction Florida managed to achieve at 295 feet above sea level — and by the 1950s it had become exactly the kind of improving cultural attraction that American families dutifully photographed themselves in front of to prove the vacation had some educational content. The two men are dwarfed not just by the tower but by their own compositional confidence: whoever held the camera stood far enough back to capture the full height of the pines and the tower, which meant the actual subjects of the portrait ended up the size of punctuation marks in their own holiday record.

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