I love Vermeer, his paintings that is. This photo was taken at Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow, New York. The real Sleepy Hollow, which is as much history as legend. It was taken in a barn a few centuries years old, as the lady demonstrated the production of flax. Sometimes you take a photo and just know it works, but it sometimes it surprises you anyway.

These historic sites have the buildings from history, and because of that they still have the light of centuries past. I’m sure I own a flash for my camera, but I couldn’t tell you where it is. You don’t get light like that from a flash, it has to be real. When it is, and when your subject has nothing to do with the twenty first century, the image goes where it wants to go. In this case it wanted to be a Vermeer.

All I had to do was let it.

Buildings mold and shape light, they absorb it, reflect it. The materials inside add their own peculiar characteristics. The woman’s clothes adds its own character. What I saw wasn’t the twenty first century, but the seventeenth. That’s time travel.