Tim Blanks talks Hair, Guido Palau s new book

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[Tim] So Guido, we re here

to talk about your new book, Hair.

The thing that stands out about it is

there is nothing natural about the people in this book.

I don t know what really kind of made me think about it,

I suppose I was looking at futuristic reference

as well as sort of things from the past,

like centuries gone by, and Dutch paintings

and things and Japanese anime and sort of like,

I was trying to think what would I like to see

if I was a hairdresser,

or I m looking at new portraiture of someone.

What would be interesting to me?

And yes, it kind of does delve into

all those different references

and I kind of wanted it to have

a slight kind of darkness to it.

You re not sure how friendly these people were.

[Tim] The people don t look accessible,

but you have also neutralized them

and put all the life of the photos in the hair.

It s a very, very eerie effect.

Yeah, I mean they re kind of drained almost,

their portrait, the way they re sort of quite distanced

from the camera, they re not really looking into the lens

a lot of the time, there s this desaturation.

They almost remove more personality, I feel,

and that s something we did kind of on purpose

with these portraits.

[Tim] The hair in the book

has this sort of sculptural identity.

Really you re working with hair

like a sculptor would work with marble or something.

Yeah, my chosen profession being a hairdresser,

that s my material I use.

Hair is my kind of way I create things in my job,

and in the book, with the hair I ve done

some sort of extreme sculpturing

and so I do things with hair

that you would not normally associate with hair,

again, to challenge people who are looking at the book,

and myself, about what can be done with hair.

[Tim] That s an interesting idea,

because this book isn t instructive,

it s not telling people how to do this.

A lot of the hair we see today,

a lot of the hair I do, is very easy looking,

very kind of unstructured.

It s not a time for big hairdos at the moment.

And so it was nice to do something that was challenging

with form, with sculpture, that I m not used to doing

so much any more, and people aren t used to seeing,

and so it hopefully makes the viewer look at hair,

beauty, and all those things in a different light.

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