![]() ![]() ![]() There’s a strand running through the ginger experience that Pokroy speaks of. ![]() “It’s because of her hair,” she told my father. I recall a few insults and more frequent remarks made by great-aunts about my childhood bad temper - “It’s the red hair,” they would say and roll their eyes.īut I also remember my grandmother spending an entire evening putting rags in my hair to create a mass of ringlets that would allow me to attend a fancy-dress day at school as Shirley Temple.Īnd then there was the time I was stopped in a shopping centre when I was nine and handed a small oil painting of a seascape by an artist who was displaying her work. My own ginger experience was nowhere as dramatic as that of many others. “Even the creators of TV series South Park had a ginger episode.”Īnyone who has grown up ginger knows what it is to be marked by difference - from mild insults to bullying, references to orang-utans, carrot tops and Duracell batteries. “I wasn’t the first person to think about using gingers,” she says. “I always wanted to photograph them in a way it was the idea of a self-portrait.” Pokroy also researched the portrayal of gingers in art and literature, compiling a long list of flame-haired luminaries - including the biblical King David, Elizabeth I, Malcolm X and Vincent van Gogh. Shooting gingers was initially a way of exploring her own identity. When I came back in 2010, that’s all I wanted to do.” “I graduated in 2007 and went to London, where I found it very difficult to make art. The project started with a group portrait of gingers. But an artist has to have conviction and be committed to an idea.” “I didn’t set out to do this,” she says, giggling, and adds: “In fact, I don’t think I knew what I was doing at the start. It contains signatures and hair samples collected from each subject - probably an unrivalled ginger DNA database. A file fat with consent forms from gingers lies on Pokroy’s desk at her Newtown, Johannesburg, studio. ![]()
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