AA-2026-1B80B4
On the image
By 1955, water skiing had completed its transformation from novelty stunt into the defining proof that a family owned a boat worth talking about. Whoever held the camera was shooting from the stern, a position that combined the best view of the skier with the worst platform for keeping anything steady, which explains why this record of a summer Saturday exists at roughly a forty-five-degree angle to the horizon.
The skier is leaning hard into the wake, knees bent in the posture that every postwar how-to pamphlet on the subject illustrated with confident diagrams, over a lake ringed by low wooded hills that could place this anywhere from the Adirondacks to the upper Midwest. What the pamphlets did not illustrate was how to photograph someone traveling at thirty miles an hour from a boat doing the same speed while someone's uncle shouted advice from the stern.
The result is a blur of a person doing something that, in 1955, still felt genuinely modern — motorboats, synthetic rope, a lake your father probably fished from a rowboat — caught at exactly the moment the camera, the boat, and the subject all moved in slightly different directions at once.
Visually related — by likeness
Water-Skier on a Summer Lake, 1955. 1955. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-1B80B4. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/water-skier-on-a-summer-lake-1955.
@misc{aaAA20261B80B4,
title = {Water-Skier on a Summer Lake, 1955},
year = {1955},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-1B80B4},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/water-skier-on-a-summer-lake-1955}
}TY - ART TI - Water-Skier on a Summer Lake, 1955 PY - 1955 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-1B80B4 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/water-skier-on-a-summer-lake-1955 ER -
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