AA-2026-A54F48
On the image
Somewhere in rural America in the 1950s, a woman in a housedress stood with a toddler on her hip in the middle of a freshly blasted limestone outcrop, while another woman looked on, and someone decided this was worth photographing. The great blasted pile of pale limestone between them and the camera suggests land being cleared — a farm expanding, a foundation being laid, the postwar countryside being remade according to the decade's confident belief that dynamite plus ambition equaled progress. Both women are dressed for the house rather than the rubble field, which was entirely normal for an era when a woman might walk from the kitchen to a demolition site in the same clothes she'd wear to a neighbor's for coffee. Nobody appears to be directing anyone, or consulting a plan, or wearing anything that could be called safety equipment, because those were concepts still gestating. The women look like they are taking a small tour of something the men in the family have just done to the landscape and are deciding whether to call it an improvement.
Visually related — by likeness
Two Women and Child Among Blasted Limestone, Rural America, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-A54F48. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-women-and-child-among-blasted-limestone-rural-america-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026A54F48,
title = {Two Women and Child Among Blasted Limestone, Rural America, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-A54F48},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-women-and-child-among-blasted-limestone-rural-america-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Two Women and Child Among Blasted Limestone, Rural America, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-A54F48 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-women-and-child-among-blasted-limestone-rural-america-1950s ER -
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