LADIES AND GENTELMEN

In a series of photographic portraits of hairdresser’s shop front windows in various cities around the world, they leaned over a niche element of urban visuality, vanishing gradually under the media and technological onslaught of advertising. A selection of 200 photographs from the series has now been published in an artist’s book titled Ladies and Gentlemen. The pictures can be arranged in sequences defying their geographical location, as the hairdresser’s front windows in Gdańsk, Tczew or Kielce are no different from those the authors had captured on the streets of Luxembourg City, Brussels, Amsterdam or Tel Aviv. This repertoire of slightly outdated fashions and narratives can be read in terms of not only consumer persuasion but also cultural recycling.

Almost all of them feature the motif of an elaborately dressed head. Simplified silhouettes, en face or in profi le, show the whole palette of styles of pop culture, from retro to new age. Clichés swarming in the mass imagination, educated on comic strips, fi lm stills, and record covers, also make references to Warhol‘s processed and duplicated “celebrity heads”. Sometimes, we can recognise the faces known from the screen or stage in these hairdresser-service images. After all, it is not the hairstyle but style itself which is the point, pertaining to more than the advertised service itself. It is the style which would make the potential client feel they had expressed themselves, choosing her-or himself in terms of the figure in the advertisement. Thus, “to appear” instead of “to have” becomes a subsequent deprivation in the society of the spectacle, where the real gives up its place to its own semiotic representation.