He said, “I look at them always as crowns. In contemporary black culture, whether worn by men or women, in public or as part of a private beauty regimen, they impart a majestic quality on the heads they adorn. But do-rags, Edmonds said, are for celebrating. Edmonds’s “Hoods” series can be read as a comment on the killing of Trayvon Martin and the endemic of racial injustice. One size fits most, the back features an elastic band that stretches to comfortably fit a. To Edmonds, do-rags are less symbolically fraught than hoods, which have long been interpreted as telegraphing menace, particularly when worn by young black men-a sentiment that the artist David Hammons captured in his 1993 piece “In the Hood,” which features a cavernous black hood that has been severed from a sweatshirt and nailed to a white wall. This low-profile cooling do rag can be worn alone or under a hard hat. In another portrait, a blue do-rag glows against a muted gold backdrop. In the background, a figure in a white do-rag evokes innocence, or religious devotion. In one image, the foreground is a billowing, out-of-focus cloud of what looks like white fur. “It starts with me.”įor his do-rag project, Edmonds again photographed his subjects in intimate closeup with their faces turned, but this time the images are more supple, with sensual blue, yellow, and monochromatic hues. “All the work that I make is from a very personal place,” he told me. Edmonds considered these photographs a kind of self-portrait. The project drew inspiration from the work of the Baroque Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán, who made images of meditating monks, their faces obscured by the shadows from their hooded robes. In his series “Hoods,” from last year, Edmonds photographed men and women of various races, their backs to the camera, wearing hoods from jackets and sweatshirts from his own wardrobe. Style, fashion, and sartorial cues have been a guiding principle in Edmonds’s work, which has focussed on men in private domestic spaces, symbols of black culture, and his own body-black, queer-as it is seen and understood in public spaces. program last year, and in January he finished a residency at Light Work, a nonprofit gallery space in Syracuse run by Jeffrey Hoone, the husband of the photographer Carrie Mae Weems. Edmonds remembered his mother wearing do-rags when he was a child now he saw them functioning as performative gestures of black masculinity, and he began collecting them as symbols of self-styled beauty.Įdmonds graduated from the Yale M.F.A. Their current use-to create and preserve certain hairstyles-came later. These same women also used their head wraps as beauty embellishments that, depending on how they were tied, signified communal identities. In some regions in the South, black women were required by law to cover their hair as a mark of enslavement. The origins of do-rags are often linked to American slavery, when women wore head-wraps in the field to protect them from the punishing heat. The accessible item typically costs anywhere from $1 to $20 from your neighborhood beauty supply store and depending on your hair care needs, durags come in all kinds of different fabrics like silk, which helps to retain moisture, as well as polyester and mesh.When the twenty-seven-year-old photographer John Edmonds moved to Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, in September of last year, he was quick to notice that many black men in the neighborhood covered their heads with do-rags, the cloths, often made out of nylon, that are tied tightly around the head to keep certain hairstyles, such as waves, in place. Now, both men and women use it, and the durag can be used to help protect other forms of natural hairstyles like braids, locs, or even wigs. Over time, the durag quickly exploded among Black men in inner-city neighborhoods, helping them to keep their waves swirling. “The tie-down was worn to protect the hair pattern.” “The idea was that you didn’t want the hair to revert to its natural, tightly coiled structure after brushing it down. “He realized he really wanted to have something to keep the hair in place,” said Darren Dowdy. Dowdy dubbed it the “tie-down.” The company started to sell the precious item in 1979. Dowdy invented the durag to help Black folks groom their natural coils. Darren Dowdy, the president of the company, told the New York Times that his father William J. The company So Many Waves claims they were the first to spark the durag phenomena in the late 1970s. Source: Steve Granitz / Getty Who invented the durag?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |