Humble Thyself

In the fall if 1962, in the first day of boarding school, I learned some lessons well. A woman teacher walked into the room, and immediately all the boys rose from their chairs as a sign of respect.

Of course I had been told this by my mother, that one should stand when a woman enters the room, but to see this in action by twenty boys in unison was quite striking. It felt so right. A lady had entered and the men (boys at the time) were willing to show their umbrage. The balance was correct. Men and Women curtsied to each other with respect.

For years I have been asked to discuss the use of the hat. Is it some surrealistic element, used like Magritte? Is it a fashion statement, or what is its purpose?

I can’t say to any of this I really know, but I will try to help explain my love of the hat.

Since my photographic beginnings, I have always photographed people with hats, Welsh farmers with their tweed caps, French farmers with their berets, Americans with their fedoras and out West with their cowboy hats, etc. It was always a small gesture to distinguish one region from another.

As time went on and my subjects became different I never abandoned the love of the hat. It is not that I grew up with people wearing them. My adolescence was during the Kennedy years when the hat was being discarded for youthful vigor, and a display of as much hair as possible. The Beatles seemed to begin the end of the hat.

But without realizing it, that seminal moment in boarding school, many years earlier, began to work its way into my psyche. You see every time I started to take a picture, I always felt something was missing. It was incomplete. The period at the end of the sentence was omitted, and had to be inserted to complete the thought.

I would stand aside the subject, and look at the figure with and without a hat and almost always the story ends with a hat being included.

There were many disagreements with Art Directors about whether the hat was appropriate given the fashion restraints of the moment, but rarely was there an argument as to whether the hat made the man look better, taller, finished, refined, elegant and oddly something else. It was always simply finding the right hat for the man.

So for years I have played with hats, and it is no wonder that people have compared my use of them to Magritte or for other surrealistic purposes, and quite honestly this may be correct. But there is something else, more ambiguous, more subtle that lies on top of a mans head.

You can see it in ancient Civil War pictures, when Lincoln’s funereal train rumbled through small American towns, meandering it’s way to Illinois. You can still see it in the military, or in the films of the 1940’s and 50’s. You can still feel the need for it in Congress, in gesture, in small everyday acts.

I am talking about humility. About recognizing your place in the world, that we are little folk in a grand scheme. That it is important at times to lower our gaze to what lies before us, and not raise our eyes to look above each other.

The hat holds the gaze to the front or to the ground. To look up or aspire one must remove ones hat, there needs to be an effort and intent to escape ones surly bounds.

I want to have a hat, to take it off when a lady walks into a room. I want there to be that special woman that is deserving of the removing of my hat. I want people to stand quietly in respect with their hat in hand as people of dignity and nobility enter the room. I want the hat so that when life on the outside seems so overwhelming and discouraging, that we have the option to remove this hat and display the strength and dignity that what lies within each of us.

So hat’s off to us All!