Thank you for posting such great responses.
In particular, thank you to Phil Beard, Joel and Erik, who very precisely identified the picture and its date. I appreciate your patience.
Your comments were divided almost equally between those who thought this was a photograph of models, taken recently, and those who thought it was a genuine picture from the 1930s / 1940s.
Highlight the space below to find out what Phil, Joel and Erik already knew:
September 1939, in Minneapolis, Minn. The picture was featured recently on the historic photo blog Shorpy, and Phil Beard explains why it looks uncannily like a model:
“It’s an FSA photo by John Vachon. He had a passion for leaning out of high windows in search of that Constructivist angle on the world.”
and as Ashley pointed out:
“The camera has a “tilt” lens, which can do strange things with the focus plane. Tilting camera lenses were much more common prior to the 1950’s.“
…..
Thank you very much to Shorpy.
Doh! I’m regular [at] http://www.shorpy.com/ and I had a nagging feeling I’d seen the photo before.
Looking forward to the next ‘Can you date….’!!
Ah yes that makes sense.
The Wheeler truck looked too modern for me to be 1930s but of course I was looking at it with European eyes.
It often happens that pre war American photos look more modern then pre war European photos.
Cool, very happy to be wrong on that one, excellent photo!