Photos and photography have always intrigued me. As a child I would take my dad's camera to take nice snapshots and analyze them afterwards, but it was the frizzy hairstyles at the BAM Dance Africa festival that inspired me to take photography a bit more seriously.
It was at this annual event of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where for the first time in my life as an adult woman, I found myself in an environment where kinky hair was the norm. Wherever I came from or wherever I had been, Suriname, the Netherlands or anywhere else on the planet, straight hair was the norm even for Black women, for centuries.
For a woman who had just gone frizzy again for a year, but had no idea what to do with her hair, this colorful spectacle was a revelation that fundamentally changed my worldview.
Never before had I, as a woman with frizzy hair, seen these kinds of examples of what could possibly be done with my natural hair. The hairstyles, from Dreadlocks to Afros, from Cornrows to Flat Twists were breathtakingly beautiful. I didn't understand why I had never seen these kinds of hairstyles before, didn't even know about the possibilities.
It was then that I realized that if I had seen these examples as a little girl, I probably would have straightened my hair at some point, but I would never have obsessively compulsively destroyed my hair, believing that straightening it was the only thing possible with my type of frizzy hair.
It also dawned on me that the high 73% hair breakage rate in the afro hair community is a direct result of not growing up with examples of hairstyles made from our own hair.
The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that afro hairstyles like these could make a world of difference in a child's life. That's when photographing afro hairstyles became a calling.
Now available in book form: Bad Hair Uprooted: The Unwritten History of Kinky Hair
That magical moment, discovering the beauty and luxury of afro hairstyles, was so overwhelming that I wanted to share it with the rest of the world, afro or not. Believing that people would let go of the stereotypical image of afro hair when experiencing the luxury, I started documenting the most beautiful hairstyles I had ever seen in my life.
Looking back now, I can proudly say that it was these photos that sparked the internet hair revolution we see today, before the Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook eras.
When it also dawned on me that Black people are the only people on earth who do not have the right to wear their God-given natural kinky hair, I wrote the piece Bad Hair Uprooted . In the pursuit of equal hair rights, my goal became:
Shooting for justice, changing perceptions one shot at the time
A collection that I was grateful to exhibit in New York, Paramaribo and Paris.
If you are interested in organizing an exhibition please contact us. For more information visit BadHairUprooted.com .