"Can I Touch It?" White Women with "Black" Hairstyles

For a project entitled Can I Touch It?, Photographer Endia Beal, captured corporate photos of white women with black hairstyles. Endia reached out to white women over 40 years old and gave them hairstyles mainly seen on black women and then took a corporate photo of them.

The concept came to her while she was interning at Yale getting her MFA in photography.

 She says she had a big red Afro and that it would stick out over her cubicle at work. She noticed that most of her male co workers were fascinated with her Afro, as most of them had never seen anything like it before. Eventually some one asked her if they could touch it, she said yes and went on to document the experiences of her white male coworkers in the form of a short video below.

This project further inspired  Endia to think about how women are perceived in the corporate world. That its possible that things like appearance, body language and of course hair can affect the way women are treated

She approached women, some of which she knew and some were strangers and asked them to participate. What she found amazing was that her as a 28 year black female could relate to the same experiences as middle aged white women. Their experiences were completely relevant to what she had experienced working in IT. She goes on to say "The experiences I had were experiences that crossed generational gaps; that crossed race, that crossed gender"

She found that so many of the women had similar stories. "One woman named Desiree, told me her employers once told her to change her name because it was not inappropriate. Another woman who had big curly hair was told by her boss that people would be distracted by  her hair, so could she send a representative in her place." 

 

"So these are all experiences of being the "other" in that space. Its not just a minority experience, its the experience that people across gender, across race and across generation can relate to; the idea of having to perform, be somebody different in that space."

 For almost all the women it was their very first experience in a black salon. "The reaction to the new hair do's were mixed. Some people loved it, some people said "this looks great but not on me"

Endia goes on to say " And so for me it was about the idea of posing that question: What if this was the norm? What if this is how these women looked on a regular day?"

Let us know what you think.

013 Beal Office Scene Excerpt (Full Video 4mins) from Endia Beal on Vimeo.