The Grammar of Glamour:Shooting the High Street

The Grammar of Glamour; Shooting the High Street The work in progress The Grammar of Glamour; Shooting the High Street involves an investigation into the materiality of photographic media. The project uses experimental visual ethnography that explores the relationship between material culture, social space and the street. Using archive images as well as original photographs the project documents the tastes, predominant aesthetics and use of photographic imagery within recent retail culture and specifically independent hair salons. It explores the ways in which the emotional and symbolic content of a thing is represented through advertising imagery, posters, magazine images, design and product photography. Part of my interest in the materiality of photographic media is understood through the uses people make of photographs in their daily lives, which includes the methods of dissemination and display in contemporary culture. The relation between the material and the real, in the face of increasingly sophisticated digital technology, is an important one for contemporary practitioners of photography. Over the last 5 years I have been developing a practice which explores representation, femininity, consumer culture and the everyday. The publication will present new methodologies in which to explore the interface between the material and the real. Interdisciplinarity is central to the research as it is informed by cultural studies, design, visual sociology, photography and popular culture studies. It is intentionally strategic in its engagement with other discourses and as such offers a unique dialogue within contemporary photographic practice. This paper will present a visual ethnography project that places the British hair salon within a tradition of vernacular street culture which is disappearing. I will focus on the significance of the image of the hair salon in British documentary photographic history, including the work of Martin Parr, Tom Wood and Humphrey Spender, with a particular emphasis on work from the North of England and the archives of the Documentary Photography Archive set up in Manchester in the 1980s, now dismantled. The photographs in Kurl up n Dye focus on backstreet hair salons and the culture of these small businesses, revealing moments of creativity and playfulness. Images of shop facades present the street corner as a site where desire and fantasy are mediated by cultural capital. The aspiration behind the names Millionhairs or Shear Class are often in tension with their immediate surroundings on the edges of the city. The shop names and typefaces signal economic status, class and taste beyond the frame of the image. The people and places in Kurl up n Dye understand the operation of glamour’s contradiction in their lives, making use of the knife-edge between image and reality. The importance of these “third places” will draw on Bourdieu’s study of taste in order to examine the irreverent nature of these type-styles and their deliberate disrespect for formal grammar and serious culture. Ultimately the importance of small things and their use of improvisation, humour and intimate contact needs to be valued alongside the gigantic, spectacular, showy and corporate. They remain of compelling interest because the hair salon can be so much more than a place to get a haircut. The uniqueness of the project lies in this focus on applied photography, which is notoriously overlooked in the existing cultural history of photographic images.