Kurl Up 'N' Dye by Inés Rae

A book exploring the vernacular in British high street culture through a photographic and typographic focus on hair salons.

‘There is a total lack of irony in the work, where irony is a common refuge for those taking a look into the strange and difficult worlds inhabited by other people. ‘Kurl up ‘n Dye’ contains no double-speak, no coded juxtapositions designed to make sense of potentially inconvenient or uncomfortable comparisons of education or personal experience, or wealth or appearance. Rae is not like the people she has met and worked with and the work reveals those differences as part of its intention. She doesn’t get her hair done at Sophisticuts every fortnight, nor would she name her own business for a joke, because people in her line of business don’t do that. But Rae also doesn’t pretend that she is invisible in this work, even though she is using documentary traditions that habitually enforce invisibility. She chooses to appear as herself in the work, alongside its other subjects - the people she’s met and the places she’s been, the functions of glamour upon people from very different places, the ways in which people identify themselves as similar or different from each other and the unavoidable business of being yourself and appearing as yourself, every day.’ from ‘Permutations’ by Simon Grennan (full text included in book)

First edition - good condition. Softcover. 2006.