“There is nothing like being yourself, especially before the eyes of someone who adores you. There is nothing like being yourself and being held, especially before the camera of someone who, frame by frame, savors the beauty of who and all he is seeing. “Nikky Finney

I would grow to learn that we were conditioned to believe that my hair, my family’s hair and anybody’s hair that was naturally curly, naturally thick - essentially African, was bad hair. Later in life I would challenge these notions around Black people and our hair. But many a Black child becomes the adult who carries the same unconscious baggage of GOOD and BAD hair that I grew up with. This is the man or woman who painfully tries to adapt their hair, and the rest of their body to an essentially Afrophobic culture, a culture which celebrates a single standard of beauty, a standard that excludes full lips, dark skin, and is-called ‘kinky’ hair.

These photographs bring attention to the symbolic role of hair in contemporary African American culture, and visualise what writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston described in her essay ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’ as our ‘will to adorn. Bill Gaskins

Good to know

• Hardback edition

• Published in October 1997

• 128 pages - texts in English

• B&W photographs

• Condition : Good. Cover presents some small signs of wear. Binding at the rear present some signs of wear. Interior is fresh