Description
Photograph, 'Four women in Gutach Valley Sunday dress at the Stuttgart Folk Festival', black and white, negative, by Hedda Hammer (Morrison), Stuttgart, Germany, 1931. This image is of four women in Gutach Valley Sunday dress, standing among a crowd at the Stuttgart Folk Festival. The dress consists of a straw hat trimmed with eleven woollen balls worn over a black hat with a stiff veil covering the eyes and tied with ribbon under the chin. The women wear an embroidered bodice over a white shirt with puff sleeves. To their right, soldiers in helmets can be seen in the middle ground, and a building behind them in the distance.

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.

Credit line
Gift of Mr Alastair Morrison, 1992

Registration number
92/1416-52