Photos Taken On A Weekend

 

During the week, suburbs can be veritable ghost towns, but on the weekends they spring to life when people can be disabused of the daily grind.

I'm reminded of a photo taken by Robert Adams in 1970 taken during his trip through Colorado. This photo obviously wasn’t taken on a weekend and is emblematic of the bleakness of American suburbia, a generation after the postwar suburban boom circa 1950. 

The suburban routines of lawn mowing, barbecues, and so on, are the corollary of going out with a camera and taking snapshots and home movies as a part of that routine. Before smartphone cameras, photography probably was another exclusive weekend activity, and the photos perhaps had a visual vibe of having been taken on a weekend, or couldn’t have been taken during the week: Adults splashing in a backyard pool is decidedly a weekend activity. It wouldn’t be a Monday or a Tuesday unless it was a vacation.

An example of a photo taken on a weekend is Ansel Adams’ Moonrise Hernandez which was reportedly taken on Sunday, November 1, 1941, although might have been taken on Halloween. Knowing that it was a Saturday or a Sunday (or Halloween on a Saturday) adds another dimension to the photo.