Woman in Autumn Scrubland, Outdoor Portrait, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Woman in Autumn Scrubland, Outdoor Portrait, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Woman in Autumn Scrubland, Outdoor Portrait, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-988764

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Somewhere on an open heath or coastal scrubland in the 1950s, a woman stood among autumn-bronzed bushes and smiled for whoever was holding the camera — which is to say, for someone who loved her enough to use up a frame of color slide film on a gray-bright day. The whole expedition has the look of a Sunday outing that required a good coat, the kind where you walked somewhere with a view and then documented the fact of having done so.

Color slide photography in the 1950s had the slightly hallucinatory quality of wanting everything to look more vivid than it was, and this one delivered: the gorse or scrub around her has gone a deep amber, her face catches the available light at full brightness, and the rest of the scene disappears into blue-green shadow. The technology was doing its best under conditions it wasn't designed for, which describes most of the 1950s.

She is dressed for the weather and smiling for the record, standing at the edge of wild country in a dark coat as though marking the boundary between the tamed world she came from and whatever was on the other side of that ridge. The camera caught her at the exact moment she decided the whole thing was worth smiling about.

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