Suburban RED
In alignment with my performative photography process, I will sometimes come up with a look for the character that is spontaneous and based purely on play and accident. In this chapter that I titled Suburban ORANGE, I decided to change my hair coloring and it came out orange upon the first bleaching. This was 2015 and Donald Trump was running for president. It seemed fitting to don orange hair at this time being that the orange hair was a big part of what Trump was known for, at least in jokes.
Of course I also had to live with this hair for several weeks as I filmed the scenes. Bleaching and coloring my hair had been something in a distant past when I was a young adult and I'd only done it once. Living with this look allowed for all kinds of feelings about masculinity and class and rebellion and assimilation. Although the look had me often feeling somewhat free and playful it also made for an intensity, a severity to the character. There had been times in my life as a teenager when I wanted to blend in with the mostly Anglo children in school and even resorted to trying to lighted my skin color with creams and powders.