For my typology machine, I sourced 11 clumps of hair from 11 people and scanned them at high resolution to create indirect portraits. I was really interested in how I could capture hair and retain the gross detail but keep an element of readability. Hair is different in it’s inherent structural attributes: the color, thickness, bends, lengths are all varied. But I think what’s interesting about these hair clumps also comes from their overall forms. We can see the result of personal human decisions in the forms each clump takes.
How people treat the hair they collect— if it’s in a mat because they keep hair in their brush, if they don’t have much because they throw much of it away, if the hair was from a shower and super clean/shiny because it doesn’t carry as many oils, or if they collected their hair from their surroundings— are all interesting things to look out for within the forms of the hair clumps.
In general, I was interested in capturing a piece of human bodies that sloughs off, but not in a super gruesome way. Another thing that was important to me was that the samples were not just pieces of hair that were cut off; hair strands hold a lot of historical information about us and I think having whole strands was really important to me. I wanted to present many peoples’ hair clumps (and not just a couple strands) together because we become accustomed to dealing with our own no-longer-attached-to-the-scalp hair but even then, it’s not usually examined so closely.
I was really inspired by Byron Kim’s Synecdoche, and also indirect portraiture as a general concept. I think limiting the field of view with which one can look at a subject is an interesting way to make observations.
I struggled quite a bit with the scanning process, trying to set up parameters that would work for all samples took a very long time. I was also unable to get the format of a web book to work though perhaps in the future if I collect more peoples’ hair and had more time it might be cool to pursue.
My process was to ask people for any hair they could spare and then scan it. Generally, it was taken from brushes, clothing, or their showers. I received their hair in bags or papers and scanned them at the highest resolution the flatbed scanners could go (12800 dpi at 2″ squares) and at an arbitrary but standard 5″ square (once again at largest resolution possible, 4800dpi) to capture the entire form of each clump of hair. Each file was a tif that was over 1.5GB. I cropped the highest resolution scans to be .25″ squares and then upsized the images by 4 for the final typology.
For anyone interested, here is the link to the unprocessed scans
Thank you to Ashley Kim, Ashley Kim, Ella, Em, Jean, Leah, Pheht, Selina, Soomin, and Stacy for the hair. And thank you to Golan and Nica for assistance and guidance throughout this project.