Vintage visages

"I look at a little hat like this, 

I lift up the veil, 

and I try to imagine the face beneath it.”

-- Isabel Wolff, A Vintage Affair

 

 

Vintage hat forms 8-8-13

 “Every face, 

every shop, 

bedroom window, 

public-house, 

and dark square 

 is a picture feverishly turned ...”

-- Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

 

Vintage hat form 8-8-13

"She had not realized how wonderful glass was,

how it protect you and kept you inside."

-- Caroline B. Cooney, Evil Returns

 

Vintage hat form (2) 8-8-13

Every week I drive past this antique shop, and every week I see these two vintage hat forms staring out at me.

These two faces are like captives.
Hostages.
Stuck in time.
Fixed in place.
Gathering dust.
Trapped behind panes of dirty window glass.

I have never seen the shop open.
The stuff seems to stay in the same places, week after week, month after month.

All year I've been telling myself to stop sometime and take pictures, but I keep forgetting to throw the camera in the car.

I finally remembered the camera, and I finally stopped.

Of course, the shop was closed, so I had to shoot the pictures from the sidewalk, with my camera pressed against the dirty glass.

I like to think that by putting their picture on the blog, I have given these two ladies a little exposure, gotten them out of their limited little world and into the bigger, wider one beyond the shop windows.