Aperture

Bill Gaskins

Last spring in a black hair salon in downtown Brooklyn, the hairdresser kept asking me if she really should take off more. “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. My recent haircut made me think of Bill Gaskins’s groundbreaking series of photographs collected in the book Good and Bad Hair (1997). 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

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