Waffle seller and silhouette cutter, Stuttgart 1937
A vendor in a tall white cap sells waffles from a tray, and beside a board of black paper profiles an old man snips a silhouette with small scissors.
In front of a long festival hall hung with flags, a young vendor in a white jacket and a tall pleated baker's cap carries a tray of waffles on a strap round his neck, and a man in a black hat counts out coins from his purse. Next to them a board of black paper silhouettes, dancers, a man in tails and rows of profiles, advertises a cutter's trade with the promise of a portrait in a minute; the vendor turns to look, and the hands of an old man in a hat guide a small pair of scissors round a sheet of black paper.
The cut silhouette had been the cheap portrait of the eighteenth century, before photography; in the 1920s the Berlin artist Lotte Reiniger made it an art of the cinema with her animated silhouette films.
