Water-Skiing Behind a Motorboat, American Lake, 1950s

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Water-Skiing Behind a Motorboat, American Lake, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Water-Skiing Behind a Motorboat, American Lake, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-83C89B

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By the mid-1950s, water-skiing had crossed the line from stunt-show novelty to the thing you were expected to be able to do if your family owned a motorboat, which meant a great many Americans spent their summers learning to fall gracefully into freshwater lakes while their friends watched from the stern. This man on a single ski is doing it correctly — upright, arms extended, red trunks the only dash of color against the churned white wake — performing competence for whoever is holding the camera from the back of the tow boat. The yellow rope connecting skier to boat frames the whole scene with a kind of geometric tidiness that the era appreciated, since the 1950s believed that leisure, properly organized, looked like a magazine advertisement. The wooded shoreline pressing in from both sides places this on one of the smaller inland lakes that served as the summer-weekend infrastructure of Middle American life, places with no name most people outside the county would recognize but which felt, to the families who went there, like the center of everything. He is not showing off; he is simply demonstrating that the afternoon is going as planned.

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