California Story Fund
Beauty Shops: Culture and Community in the Bay Area
SF Camerawork
San Francisco
Project Director: Candacy Taylor
Chronicling beauty shop culture in the S.F. Bay Area
This photography/story project will examine role of the beauty shop as an American cultural institution and explore how beauty shops develop and maintain community among women.
“The goal of the project is to capture the essence of community that happens in beauty salons,” said Project Director Candacy Taylor. Taylor is the director of the highly successful Council-supported project on career waitresses that is the basis of an upcoming book from Cornell University Press.
Taylor said that the project would build on the work of such scholars as Ingrid Banks, Wendy Gambier and Julie Willett, who have looked at issues of gender, race, and class in female-based culture.
Taylor will interview and photograph both stylists and their customers. She will focus on shops that have been in operation for at least 30 years serving a particular cultural group or immigrant population.
The project will conclude with a multimedia photography-based exhibit. Featured will be excerpts from the interviews, photographs, each salon’s history, and the different styling methods and cultural practices the salon has used over time.