Espionage

Dressed to kill

In 2022, I read an exciting book by Sonja Purnell called A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II.

“This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman--rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg--who talked her way into the spy organization deemed Churchill's "ministry of ungentlemanly warfare," and, before the United States had even entered the war, became the first woman to deploy to occupied France.” - excerpt from Goodreads intro

Previously, I had purchased a pretty blue hat with netting from a vintage store which I thought might go well with my blue mother-of-the-groom dress for a costume. We have a realistic-looking skull sitting in basement storage. I put the hat on the skull and took a few pictures for fun. Why…what do you do for fun?

I also found an evil looking roast injector at the vintage store, which looked like a torture device and got my imagination going! Remembering the spy book, I wondered if I could use all these various props for a 1940’s spy scene.

I looked for ways to build a smoky, underworld WWII spy background. There is a bar in Milwaukee called The Estate, an historic cocktail lounge. I contacted the manager and he allowed me to come in on a weekday afternoon before they opened to take pictures of the lounge. My husband posed as the doomed man at the bar in a suit and fedora. He doesn’t smoke but I had him hold a rolled up piece of paper that I would later make into a burning cigarette (using incense smoke) in Photoshop. I wasn’t in costume during the photo shoot but worked my way into the scene with my blue dress, borrowed black evening gloves and the superimposed skull for a head, in a separate photo shoot in my studio.

It took several weeks but I like the resulting image above.

The lessons I learned with this piece is to be brave and ask strangers for photo background opportunities, be patient, take your time, learn how to best use your camera settings and be ready to be disappointed when it doesn’t print out the way you see it on the monitor. So much to learn.

P.S. That is not a prosthetic leg.