Women and Their Purses - A New Street Photography Collection
It is warming right up in Nashville, so my weekly photo walk down Broadway has dramatically shortened to about 2 1/2 hours. I am taking approximately 50 to 100 pictures in a day, but I am still coming home with 2-3 of what I call “post-able” pictures. That is about the same number I came home with when I was staying 4-5 hours and taking 100-200 photos in a day during the spring. It is a cause for celebration, right? I do think that being mindful about what I am trying to say with my photos is helping me see more moments that are meaningful to me.
If you have been reading about my adventures on Broadway in Nashville, you may have come to understand that, for the most part, I feel like a stranger in a strange land when I am walking through Nashville’s entertainment district. Finding common ground with the people who are working and playing in downtown has been challenging for me. However, I am beginning to make some breakthroughs. Last week I talked about the honky tonk greeters. Ho boy, I really relate to the people working in the service industry. Owning Subway restaurants for 17 1/2 years officially qualifies me as experienced in service work. Now I have found another common point: ladies and their purses. Here is what I have come to understand. Purse behavior transcends where you are and what you are doing. It is a shared cultural experience for women.
This bit of insight came to me because for the last two weeks my post-able pictures have included a lady with her purse. I certainly was not looking for such moments. Perhaps it was a nudge from the photography gods. I am hopeful it is a sign I have pushed my quest for artistic vision forward a bit. Here is roughly where I am on that. I want to communicate that we are all more similar than different. A specific application is that I see myself in others. I enjoy taking pictures that “tell my story”. My goodness I have a purse story. It is in some regards a coming-of-age story. It is also a story of traditions passed down from mother to daughter. I even see a little opportunity to introduce humor. These pictures, at least, make me smile.
Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic. Big black purses never go out of style.
I first started carrying a purse in 7th grade. Life was changing rapidly for me. I had begun to give up the rough and tumble Tomboy personae of my elementary school years. I had come to accept the fact that I was not going to be a man when I grew up. That felt like a real limit to my options in the future. This is the coming-of-age part of the story. My purse was the symbol of an irrevocably changed me.
Berlin, Germany. You are not going to separate her from her purse. She is a woman after my own heart.
The seventh grade purse was a ghastly, enormous black thing with at least one cowbell on it. It was very stylish if you were 13 in 1960. It was big enough to be a backpack. I do not know when school backpacks were invented, but maybe this was the start. Girls have to learn purse behavior. Rule #1 in purse behavior is never get separated from your purse. That was not a habit I learned very quickly. We were changing classes in school for the first time, and I managed to leave my purse behind at least once almost every day. I remember thinking how absurd that was, given the sound and size of the purse.
Nashville, Tennessee. Young or old, we find quiet places to fiddle with our purses.
Rule #2 in purse behavior is that women fiddle with their purses. I do not care how many compartments or pockets your purse has, or how well organized you are in distributing your stuff in said places, you will always have to look for something. I like to say that as we grow older we are more of ourselves. Over the years, I have lifted purse fiddling into an art form. It amuses me when I encounter a fellow purse fiddler.
Rule #3 in purse behavior is that you have to get creative when you have to manage your purse. When I posted this recently taken photo of creative purse management on Instagram, it seemed to amuse most viewers as much as it had amused me. I was especially drawn to one comment from my long time IG guy friend, JRaHuL, “And I hate to carry it.” That reminded me that I had a photo of the Outlier purse behavior, get a man to carry your purse. I am quite drawn to pictures of this kind of purse behavior because I do not entirely understand it. I never practice this behavior because I am stuck on Rule # 1, never get separated from your purse.
St. Petersburg, Russia. My friend is not the only one who does not like to be the purse carrier.
Now I have two things to look for in my weekly photo walks downtown: Moments with greeters and moments with purses. They are very different concepts but they spring from the same place. I know about these things. There is at least the chance that I can create a picture with a story, because it has a story for me.