Woman in Autumn Woodland, Cat-Eye Sunglasses, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Woman in Autumn Woodland, Cat-Eye Sunglasses, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Woman in Autumn Woodland, Cat-Eye Sunglasses, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-2D02C9

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Dressed in a fitted black jacket with embroidered sleeves and cigarette pants, she is unmistakably going somewhere, or has just come from somewhere, in the sense that 1950s women were rarely photographed outdoors unless the outing had a stated purpose. The cat-eye sunglasses and the folded paper in her hand give her the air of someone who has received important instructions and intends to follow them, or possibly of someone who has just written important instructions and intends to deliver them.

The setting is a deciduous woodland in full fall color, the kind of park or private property where a fallen birch log has been left as a rustic boundary marker because the decade had not yet decided that tidiness was a virtue in nature. She walks the plank path between the log and the trees with the composure of a woman who has worn heels in worse terrain and is not about to acknowledge the terrain at all.

What the camera caught, without meaning to, is the particular confidence of a well-dressed woman in 1950s America who considered it entirely normal to be impeccably turned out in the middle of the woods on what appears to be a Tuesday in October.

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