It
almost sounds like the opening line to a joke: A young black woman
takes a bunch of middle-aged white women who she doesn’t know in
Woodstock, N.Y., to a black salon, gives them a new “black” hairdo, and
then takes their portrait.
Although photographer Endia Beal
laughs freely while discussing “Can I Touch It?” the point of the series
that she worked on this summer during a five-week residency with the
Center for Photography at Woodstock isn’t about getting laughs.
The
rules were simple: After getting their new styles, the women had to
agree to be photographed in a traditional corporate portrait, even if
they weren’t happy with the result.
Beal decided not to give the
women an option of choosing a style. “I said, ‘I am going to give you a
black hairstyle,’ and they were like, ‘You’re going to give me
cornrows?’ ” Beal recalled of her conversations with her subjects. “And I
said, ‘No, we’re going to do finger waves.’ ‘Finger waves? What’s that?
You mean from the ’20s?’ And I said, ‘These are a little bit different
type of finger waves!’ ”
Beal specifically chose women who were
at least in their 40s, but she tried mostly for baby boomers. “I wanted
people that had a certain idea of what you’re supposed to look like in
the workspace, because it would be a challenge for them to understand
what I experienced in that space,” she said. “And to a degree, many
young white women have shared that experience, but for older white women
it’s an experience they haven’t necessarily had.”
Although the
project has a quirky sense of humor, Beal is an artist looking to open a
dialogue among people of different gender, race, and generations about
the ways in which we express ourselves, specifically in a corporate
environment.
Some of these ideas first came to Beal while she was
interning in the IT department at Yale while she was there getting her
M.F.A. in photography. Beal is tall and black, and at the time she was
sporting a large red afro that stood out among her colleagues, who were
mostly shorter white males. One colleague told her about a rumor
circulating around the office that many of the men were curious about
her hair and wanted to touch it.
Being an artist and not wanting
to shy away from her afro—or what Beal called “the elephant in the
room”—she asked the men to not only touch her hair but to really pull
it. She then recorded them a week later on video talking about what was
for many of the men a new experience. “I wanted to allow someone to feel
something different, to experience something they never had before, and
through that experience, they felt uncomfortable,” Beal said. “And then
to talk about it kind of amplifies that feeling.”
Beal knew
showing up in a corporate environment with a nonconformist hairstyle
might mean she’d have to overcome obstacles, but she didn’t feel that
burden should be entirely up to her. Creating an art project seemed a
perfect way to bridge the gap.
Many of the women Beal included in
the project said they felt excited simply to learn about new products
and styles and to be able to ask questions without feeling
inappropriate. Beal said the project is all about taking a risk,
stepping out of your comfort zone, and trying out a new experience.
Beal
has also included women in North Carolina in the series and is
currently there for a year after receiving a grant to continue her work.
She is considering having the women enter their workplace while wearing
the new hairstyle, and she is working on a video of the women talking
about their experiences.
Beal said many of the women she took to
the salon took pictures of their new hairstyle on their smartphones and
posted pictures on Facebook. Almost all of them embraced Beal after the
portraits were taken, saying they were excited to have experienced
something new. “Some of them wanted to wear [their hairstyles] out, and
some wanted to go home,” Beal said. “Many of them said, ‘I can’t wait to
get home and show my husband!’ ”
what do you all think?
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