At first glance, you would be tempted to think that these pictures were clicked sometime in the 1950s, but you would be mistaken. These are actually members of America’s Rockabilly community – people who dress, drive and decorate their homes just like in the fifties.
Jennifer Greenburg, a 36-year-old assistant professor of photography at Indiana University Northwest, has been photographing the Rockabillies for a decade now. “There are people out there who very legitimately want to imitate the 1950s,” she said. “They move to the suburbs, have two kids and live behind a white picket fence.”
‘Rockabilly’ refers to a genre of popular music in the fifties that mashed rock ’n roll with other types of music. Now, it is a group of people who want to surround themselves with as many things from the 1950s as possible. “At first I thought the culture was about fashion,” Greenburg said. “Then I realized it was much, much more than that. I realized that this was a culture of people who functioned as a community.” At the heart of the Rockabilly community lies a great love for quality and design. The fifties were a time when consumer products in America were made by industrial designers who took care of functioning as well as aesthetics.