Proposal
23/09/2016
I’m interested in looking into a broad study of hair and it’s significance to both myself and society. I’ve started looking into hair on a personal level, having suffered from hair loss myself, and how it can help to create someones identity. As part of this hair study I want to look at my own experience and create images surrounding my hair loss, the emotions I felt and how that made me feel about my identity. When suffering from hair loss, I wrote a childlike story about the goings on and have created some very descriptive imagery from the language I have used, which I could use to create images for this project. I also want to look into hair and colour, hair and texture and how one ‘wears’ their hair. This is an idea which relates to the idea of hair being part of our identity, as even though most of us have hair naturally, we still use it as an accessory to adorn and decorate ourselves, to create an image for ourselves using our hair.
My ideas are very broad so far and I feel like I should keep it this way, shooting around my subject so that I can then create a tight body of work once I’ve researched the ideas and understood which succeed more and make me want to create more work.
So far I have created work around the idea of wearing our hair, taking portraits of the front and back of different people, showing how they wear their hair and how different they are. I like the idea of somehow showing these people with their hair and then without, looking into the idea that their hair identifies them and once its gone people look very different and we have to look for different identifies for them.
My ideas are very broad so far and I feel like I should keep it this way, shooting around my subject so that I can then create a tight body of work once I’ve researched the ideas and understood which succeed more and make me want to create more work.
So far I have created work around the idea of wearing our hair, taking portraits of the front and back of different people, showing how they wear their hair and how different they are. I like the idea of somehow showing these people with their hair and then without, looking into the idea that their hair identifies them and once its gone people look very different and we have to look for different identifies for them.
Daniel Regan
Daniel Regan has created a project focusing on people who have lost their hair due to alopecia, photographing people how they 'don't wear their hair', whether they want to bare themselves naked or keep their drawn on hair features. The focus of the project is to make hair loss more known within western society and also to show each individual that they're not alone and that you are you, you must choose how you look and not worry about what others think. In terms of my work, I agree with this comment, that people must try to be happy with how they look and wear/not wear their hair however they feel comfortable. In the end its all about your comfort and often that is worn naturally rather than artificially. For now, I am looking at people with hair, how they use it illustrate their personality and accessorise. However, as the project progresses I would be interested in contacting people who have lost their hair, and take portraits of how they don't wear their hair, still using the absence of hair as an accessory.
"Throughout this project I invited people to be photographed as and how they wanted to be photographed. For some it involved baring all and showing their ‘naked selves’ and for others they wished to keep their eyelashes or eyebrows.The true message of the project is that it’s OK being you, but most importantly being the you that you choose." - Daniel Regan