Photographs by: Bill Gaskins
Introduction by: Nikky Finney
Subject: General Interest/African American Studies/Photography
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2475-X
Pages: 128 pp. 60 duotones
Description: Good and Bad Hair highlights a dynamic form of personal expression, and provides a means for opening up discussion of that expression through a photography book accessible to all.
'Is it a coincidence that we often tend to define our blackness by our hair? Is black hair like black music? Look at a person's head and you'll see the sadness of the blues, in search of a comb, as well as the jazz improvisation which is interwoven into a mixture of braids and beads. The photography of Bill Gaskins is what one might call 'hair text' and his work encourages us to pay attention to another manifestation of the black experience."-E. Ethelbert Miller, Director, African American Resource Center, Howard University
"The photos in Good and Bad Hair explode the ethical/ethno-cultural categories referenced by the book's title. Through a subversive act of seeing, Gaskins takes us beyond rigid 'Afrocentric' and racist 'Afrophobic' beauty canons to brilliantly document an African-American practice of coiffure as cultural resistance. His gorgeous images of fabulous 'dos reveal a characteristically African double coding of African-American hair as social text and aesthetic medium." -Judith Wilson, Yale University
In a time when image is indeed everything, our personal appearance has a tremendous effect on nearly every aspect of our lives on a daily basis. Our choice of hairstyle can mean the difference between acceptance and rejection by groups and individuals. The choices made by African Americans are particularly charged, often affecting the wearer and the viewer in unique and sometimes life-altering ways.
Good and Bad Hair emerges out of photographer Bill Gaskins's traveling photo exhibition of the same name. The book features 60 evocative photographs of African American men, women, and children, documenting contemporary black hairstyles and their role as a feature of African American culture.
On one level, the photographs present readers with a variety of popular and personal approaches to wearing one's hair. On another level, they isolate what amounts to a bold, assertive departure from the common definition of American beauty that excludes the physical features of many people of African descent. This narrow definition of beauty has created a race-based measurement for what is considered "good" and "bad" hair. Gaskins's pictures identify African Americans from different regions of the United States who expressively symbolize their sense of self and often their sense of an African or black identity through their hair.
BILL GASKINS is a visiting artist and assistant professor of African American studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Before assuming his current position, Gaskins served as a visiting artist in the department of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
