Faces from the past

This is one of the old pictures I bought at the flea market last weekend.

They're so overpriced there I always tell myself to just walk by -- don't even look! -- but some long-gone face always catches my eye and in the end I consider myself lucky if I manage to get away without buying everything. It's the faces of course, but also the clothes, and the poses, and the look back at a time when being photographed was an event, something you wore your best clothes for. Even when I was a kid, when almost every household had a camera to capture the big occasions, birthdays and reunions and vacations, people still went to department store photo studios to have a "nice" portrait done, two 8 by 10's to frame and a dozen wallet sized pictures to hand out to all the relatives.

I picked this girl from the pile because of her pose -- I'm guessing she hadn't sat for many photographs before. I like the way she's turned to the side, with her left hand dangling, but she just doesn't know what to do with her right hand. If you look closely you can see that her knuckles are dark, bruised maybe, or stained, or perhaps just red from scrubbing floors or doing laundry, so she could buy that pretty dress and admittedly unfortunate hat and have her picture taken.