The Beautiful Women From Fanø

The danish artist Trine Søndergaard made these amazing pictures of women from the little danish island Fanø, in their historical traditional dresses and head-scarfs. We are so used to see pictures of traditional costumes from all over the world, that we almost forget about the rich history right in front of us. The mask is called a "Strude".
Of course it makes people think of the current discussion about Muslim head-scarfs and Burqas ...
"What's interesting is how we see the images today," says Søndergaard "The Strude is not a burqa... it's a protection against the sun and sandstorms... but we read our culture and time into the pictures, so there's this confusion."



STRUDE

By Camilla Jalving, artcritic, Ph.D

The scarf reaches all the way down to the neck. Tied over the chin, mouth and the tip of the nose is a piece

of material secured with a ribbon around the neck. Another piece, held in place in the same manner, covers

the forehead, while the hair is hidden beneath a second scarf. Through a small slit, one can see the eyes

– her eyes. But she herself is looking away. This picture is part of Trine Søndergaard’s series of photographs

Strude taken on the small Danish west coast island of Fanø in the period 2007-2009. It was here that in

former times the women were so attired, like the woman in the photograph, with a ‘strude’ – a hood which

covered the upper and lower parts of the face as protection against the sun and wind when they were

working in the fields. They also wore a dress covered with symbols, parts of which accompanied them

throughout their entire lives, from when, as young girls, they reached confirmation age and were

appropriately veiled, until when, as married women, they were supposed to mark their marital status and

indicate important stages of life to the world around them. In this way, the costume of the Fanø women

spoke its own language. It had its own alphabet and its own grammar, which only the initiated were able to

decode. For the uninitiated it remained a shield, an armour against wind and weather and inquisitive gazes.

Today the dresses and accompanying hoods, which are only part of the working clothes, are worn on

special occasions only, such as the annual Sønderho Day, the second Sunday in July. On that day the

town’s inhabitants and visitors on holiday put on the old costumes to transform themselves at a stroke into

exotic creatures from a bygone age. It is on such occasions that the artist Trine Søndergaard has come with

her camera to a temporarily-devised studio in the Lorenzen house in Sønderho, and once in the attic of the

library in Nordby, to photograph women of all ages wearing the dress, scarf and hood.