The Cultural Significance Of Hair In African Women
Lives Through Intimate Salon Rituals In Senegal

Edge of Humanity Magazine

2 hours ago

Photographer Katarina Radovic is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this documentary photography. From the project ‘When You’ve Stopped Combing Me, I’ll Stop Hating You’. To see Katarina ’s body of work, click on any photograph.

“Quand vous aurez fini de me coiffer, j’aurai fini de vous ha ïr” – the line from Saint John Perse’s Eloge XVII, is what countless black girls must be feeling about their mothers, elder sisters or relatives during the hair-dressing ritual, the great domestic drama of all Black African women.

This photo project was realized in Saint-Louis, Senegal in 2013. The story takes place in a women’s coiffure salon, Chez Marieme Soda Diop, where traditional tools and techniques are used to create an array of female hairstyles, from the quite ordinary to the almost unimaginable. Each of them requires a considerable amount of time and patience, and without doubt, a certain amount of agony.

I was trying to capture the beauty in the making and the beauty of the making, the interactions of pleasure and pain in the process of hairdressing in this African culture, and the personal feelings involved in this ’sacrifice’ to higher goals, such as initiation into society, identification with one’s ethnic, cultural and/or age group, economic status, religious affiliations, etc. I have tried to explore how pride and glory exact their price, and how tales of hair hopes and hair horrors accompany one another. I believe there is something in the rapport between the coiffeurs and their clients that comes prior to the final product: the intermingled feelings of tenderness, pain, obsession, seduction, confidence, rivalry, love and hate, on the verge of a ’sado-masochistic’ relationship.

Artist Statement 

Moving across various themes and photographic practices, I try to trace the link between reality and fiction, the real world and the socially and culturally originated visions of reality. My photographic work consists of unique research into identity, (self)-presentation, human relationships and communication, as well as cultural differences. Directly or indirectly, human beings are my main protagonist.

Bio 

Katarina Radović was born in Belgrade, where she currently lives and works. In the late 1990s, she studied Art History at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. Later on, she enrolled at the Department of Photography at the BK Academy of Arts in Belgrade, where she graduated in 2006.

As a free-lance artist, Katarina has participated in a number of exhibitions and festivals in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Spain, The Netherlands, France, Malta, Egypt, Senegal, Japan and USA.

Katarina received the KulturKontakt artist-in-residence grant in Vienna, Austria, in 2007; the European Cultural Foundation (ECF) grant for the project Until Death Do Us Part in 2009; and the artist-in-residence grant from the Fondazzjoni Kreattività in Malta in 2019. In 2020, as a grant recipient of the International Summer Academy of Art in Salzburg, Austria, she attended a thematic photography course.

All images and text © Katarina Radovic