Southwestern United States high country
AA-2026-C5EB92
On the image
Someone stood at the edge of a mountain lake in the off season and decided it was worth a slide anyway, on the theory that any body of water flanked by pines constitutes a scenic opportunity. The ice has gone milky and patched, the kind of half-thawed surface that tells you it is not quite winter and not quite spring, and nobody in this photograph seems bothered by that ambiguity. A few dark shapes at the shoreline, possibly rocks, possibly the family's abandoned gear, sit ignored while the real subject, the view itself, gets its moment.
This was a common ritual of postwar car travel through the high country of the Southwest: pull off, admire the pines, take the shot, move on to the next scenic pullout. The Kodachrome of the era has aged into a deep, uniform blue, turning an ordinary overcast afternoon into something that looks faintly extraterrestrial. Nobody who stood here intended to make a moody picture; the film did that decades later, on its own schedule.
The historian's note
The scene shows a partially frozen lake bordered by ponderosa pine forest, a landscape and elevation typical of the Mogollon Rim country of Arizona or comparable high-country regions of the American Southwest, where lakes at 6,000 to 8,000 feet commonly carry ice into late winter and early spring. Amateur color photography of such sites became widespread in the 1950s as Kodachrome and similar reversal films made travel snapshots practical for casual tourists rather than professional photographers alone.
The pronounced blue cast across the frame is a known characteristic of aging color transparency film from this period, caused by the differential fading of dye layers over decades of storage. It is not evidence of the original lighting conditions but a chemical artifact of the film stock's age, common to slides of this vintage regardless of subject.
Subjects & keywords — each links to a search
Visually related — by likeness
Frozen Lake and Ponderosa Pines, Southwest Highlands, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-C5EB92. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/frozen-lake-and-ponderosa-pines-southwest-highlands-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026C5EB92,
title = {Frozen Lake and Ponderosa Pines, Southwest Highlands, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-C5EB92},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/frozen-lake-and-ponderosa-pines-southwest-highlands-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Frozen Lake and Ponderosa Pines, Southwest Highlands, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-C5EB92 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/frozen-lake-and-ponderosa-pines-southwest-highlands-1950s ER -
From the community
Identifications, corrections, and discussion from readers — reviewed by a librarian before appearing here.
Sign in to add an identification, correction, or comment.
No notes yet — be the first to add what you know about this image.