Figure 1 – IPhone Selfie in a top-hat. (c) DE Wolf 2015
As Figure 1 attests, I found myself this past Sunday mugging in a top-hat for a selfie at the Peabody and Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. What is it about hats, masks, and costumes that transform the self, that take us into worlds imagined? I suspect that it all begins with the masque, a thing that truly metamorphoses us into another dimension. This dimension in prehistoric times took our ancestors into that higher and spiritual plane. It is the same reason that priests wear robes – to transcend.
We have several times discussed how photography enables us to revisit the 19th century to see those people frozen in time, across time. But here is a real, or imagined, possibility to actually transform oneself back, to become one of these people ourselves. I remember a television movie where it is the completeness of the costume that ultimately breaks the bonds of time that unsticks, thank you Kurt Vonnegut, the protagonist. In Figure 1, my Lands End knit shirt protects me from unexpected time warps. The picture works in color, but looks rather stunted when I changed it to black and white. It is of this not that century. So again, the transformation was less than complete.
Your face in a mirror is oh so familiar. The hat transforms it. It hides the hair, or in my case the lack there of. But still the features are strong and recognizable. They are tangible evidence that we have not truly crossed a lamina of time and are just playing with a little magic. Is this a second definition to the phrase “hat trick?”