This Artist Uses an Antique Camera to Photograph (and Reclaim) the Power of Women’s Hair

Rachel Portesi’s preoccupation with hair is dense. The artist describes her own as “long, luxurious, beautiful hair. Every person who goes to cut my hair mentions it,” she says. “Someone even tried to buy it once in a Dunkin’ Donuts.”

All that female hair evokes—a tense tangle of sexuality, gender, self-identity, ownership, repression, and conformation—is the focus of Portesi’s latest series, “Hair Portraits,” which is on exhibition at Vermont’s Brattleboro Museum & Art Center starting this weekend. In her images, which have an antique appearance as they are tintypes, the artist molds and sculpts her sitters’ hair, defying gravity and any notion of how hair ought to look.

Portesi explains her residency coincided with an uneasy transition to empty nester status: “I was just coming out of a certain phase of motherhood and feeling weird and old and uncomfortable. I was trying to search for a different part of myself that I felt was lost.” In the little village of Saxtons River, Vermont, Portesi works from her home in a space above her garage formerly used by her artist husband. She describes it as “cluttered for a studio.

, only upright and with daisies and lilies. If the eye deems these images antique at first glance, the wild woman hairdos and the bare breasts suggest otherwise.Photo: Courtesy of Rachel Portesi“Historically, women’s hair has been viewed as a symbol of sexuality and fertility. There seemed to be all sorts of limits placed on women’s hair,” Portesi says, citing the Orthodox Jewish custom of women wearing wigs after marriage.

please help me pay for my study contract🥺😖🤞

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