In 2022, I put a call for models on my Instagram story with “Black women to the front” at the top of the post. Amira reached out and we scheduled a time to shoot. We’d only met once before, briefly at a party two years prior. When deciding when to take the pictures Amira let me know she was basing when to do her hair around the shoot, so I asked if I could just take pictures while she did her hair. I spent several hours on a Friday evening with someone I barely knew as they went through the process of installing a protective style. The shoot was a funky amalgamation of candid shots (as Amira was seriously doing her hair) and posed images. Taking these photographs felt like documenting an endurance piece. I wasn't even doing any hair, but to be present for 4-5 hours as someone detangled, blow dried, and styled their hair was exhausting. Amira turned her private beauty ritual into a performance. Most moments, she was lost in the labor of styling her hair. In others, she was hyper aware of the camera. Striking a super model-esque pose or doing an exaggerated gesture while holding a comb.
The resulting work(completed two years after the initial shoot) is 100 square frames of Amira doing her hair from start to finish presented in a large grid on the wall. The final installation is subtly reminiscent of a poster one may see outside of a braiding salon or barber shop, showing off the styles they offer. The grid format also alludes to the work of artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson.
In this work, I reframe the everyday as an epic performance. The act of putting your hair in a protective style(even when there’s no camera) is a form of durational and endurance art. The installation is confrontational in its size and perhaps overwhelming due to the sheer amount of content. There are 100 glimpses of endurance, beauty, and ritual.