It was in 1978 during my first summer of making portraits while using an 8x10 inch large
format camera that I found myself drawn to photographing redheads. I have often been asked
'why redheads ' and I've often felt it was because in summer redheads seem to bloom in the sun
more gloriously than the rest of us. But it also might have been my living far out on the tip
of Cape Cod surrounded by all the blue light of sea and sky which made me pay more attention
to the flamboyant qualities of redheads. Their hair and the exotic markings of their skin in
sunlight became even rosier and more astonishing in that blue atmosphere. Redheads like film
itself are transformed by sunlight. It seems natural to me now that I would have paid
attention to this new phenomenon as it appeared within the larger subject of the Cape itself.
After making more than 50 portraits that first month in which at least 30 were of redheads I
understood that this was an impulse to be taken seriously. I ran an ad in the local paper the
Provincetown Advocate: REMARKABLE PEOPLE! If you are a redhead or know someone who is I'd like
to make your portrait call.... They began coming to my deck bringing with them their courage
and their shyness their curiosity and their dreams and they shared their stories of what it
was like to be a redhead. They spoke of the painful remembrances of childhood the violations
of privacy and name calling-Hey red freckle face carrot head. They also shared with me their
sense of personal victory at having overcome this early unwanted celebrity and how like
giants or dwarfs or athletes they had finally grown into their specialness and by surviving had
been ennobled by it. You could say that they had been baptized by their own fire and that
their shared experience had formed a blood knot among them. I had begun making portraits with
the intention of photographing ordinary people. But redheads are both ordinary and special.
Their slender slice of the genetic pie accounts for only 2 or 3 percent of the world's
population. As different as redheads are in terms of nationality and religion they often give
the appearance of a strong familial connection. My way of making portraits is not by getting
down on my hands and knees nor climbing high on a ladder nor getting into bed with a
celebrity but simply standing eye to eye with anyone has found their way to me young or old.
I need only one or two sheets of film and the patience to see it through. This new edition of
'Redheads' will have a number of new and previously unseen portraits.
