![]() I was someone who was interested in affecting how people thought about black people. Gaskins remembers coming across the text as a high school student in 1970 and being struck, he recalled, by how Packard "proposed visual culture as a persuasive tool to change how people think, and the way photography could have an effect on the future. "Good hair” and "bad hair” are terms deeply embedded in the fabric of the African diaspora and African American communities.īill Gaskins came to photography after reading The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard's 1957 nonfiction work on the psychology behind advertising. Hair is intrinsic to the way we define ourselves in African American communities and is so natural to speak about: in a conversation last fall, Lorna Simpson reminisced about the scandal of her mother getting an Afro in the late 1960s when she was supposed to be a good middle-class woman with a bob perm. ![]() My recent haircut made me think of Bill Gaskins’s groundbreaking series of photographs collected in the book Good and Bad Hair (1997). "It is so long,” she lamented, "and there is all this good hair in the back.” "Coolie hair,” my grandfather would say, using the derogatory term to refer to his own Southeast Asian heritage. ![]() ![]() Last spring in a black hair salon in downtown Brooklyn, the hairdresser kept asking me if she really should take off more. ![]()
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