Young Girl in Backyard, Suburban America, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Young Girl in Backyard, Suburban America, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Young Girl in Backyard, Suburban America, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-7BE260

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Sometime in the 1950s, a small girl was dressed in her best ruffled party frock — the kind of pale blue dress with white organdy trim that required ironing on both sides — and sent into the backyard to be photographed. The person holding the camera was almost certainly a parent who had recently acquired a color camera and was working through the logic that everything worth doing was worth documenting in Kodachrome.

The clipped hedge behind her, the well-kept lawn, and the neighboring rooflines are the complete geography of postwar suburban childhood: a world of short distances, known faces, and yards that looked roughly identical from one block to the next. The dress says this is a special occasion. The fact that the occasion appears to be standing on the grass says it isn't.

She is grinning at the camera with the cooperative energy of a child who has been asked to smile and has decided to really commit to it. The overexposed flash at her chest means the dress — which was obviously the point — is the one thing you can't fully see.

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