Description
Photograph, 'Two smiling women in regional dress at the Stuttgart Folk Festival', black and white, negative, by Hedda Hammer (Morrison), Stuttgart, Germany, 1931. Portrait of two smiling women in regional dress at the Stuttgart Folk Festival, their arms linked with the two men standing next to them who are cut by the frame of the photograph. The group is standing outside in a crowd of people in front of a building. The woman on the left of the image is wearing a large white bonnet with lace ribbon extending from the bonnet across her shoulders, and falling alongside her plaits. The woman to the right is wearing a dark bonnet with sheer, gathered brim.

Significance statement
This and other negatives of people in regional dress at the Stuttgart Folk Festival are among the few known photographs taken by Hedda Hammer (Morrison) during her youth in Germany. The images were perhaps captured as an assignment undertaken while she was a student at the Bavarian State Institute for Photography in Munich. Hedda has carefully recorded the detail of regional costume and accessories, the shape and texture of hats and the beauty of elaborate headdresses as if discovering and exploring the 'exotic' within her own culture.

Production notes
This is one of about 50 photographs known to have been taken by Hedda Hammer (Morrison) at the Stuttgart Folk Festival. This image was taken on Eastman Kodak nitrate film.

Registration number
92/1416-45/1