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About Heads
Product Description Unmasked and stripped of makeup and hairdos, what do the human face and head tell us? This striking book provides the answers. A hat designer, Punk musician, sculptor, fireman, professional rent-a-Buddha, heavyweight boxer, peace movement worker, gourmet chef, United Nations official, dog trainer, chiropractor, sanitation worker, Marine Corps pilot, tire retreader-these and many more: 184 men and women with only one thing in common. They are bald. Unmasked, void of make-up and shorn of hair, stripped of civilized disguise, what does a human face say? And how does it make us feel? Avant-garde photographer Alex Kayser launches us on an odyssey into the emotionally charged topography of the human countenance. Kayser shares the story of his work in a delightfully candid conversation, and National Book Award winner Richard Howard provides a brilliant and provocative afterword. About the Author Alex Kayser's previous books include Artists Portraits; his photographs have been published in numerous magazines, including Geo, Fortune, and Esquire. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Alex Kayser: A Conversation with Lyn Mandelbaum and Alan Axelrod LM: This book consists of one photograph, you said? AK: Yes, 184 times the same picture. Only the faces change. There is a different person in every shot. LM: Why doesn't anyone have hair? AK: Some of them have no hair naturally, but most of them shave their heads daily. AA: What in the world started you off on a project of photographing bald people? AK: This book isn't about baldness. It has nothing to do with bald people. It has to do with faces, exposed faces. I wanted to eliminate hair in this series in order to deal solely with physiognomy. Hair would have been quite distracting. LM: It really works. As a viewer, you go directly into the face, and you get lost in its features. This guy is great. Who is he? AK: He's the vice president of a big steel company, and the one down here is the fourteen-year-old singer of a New Wave band. The people photographed come from just about every walk of life. LM: This book is all headshots. Amazing. I never saw anything this sharp, this clear before. AK: I tried to do an honest, straight series, not faking anything, not flattering, but analytic, if you like. LM: For me, what makes the pictures so attractive is their directness. You get totally taken in by the subject. Its almost impossible to escape. But why isn't anybody smiling? AK: Why isn't Michelangelo's David smiling? I tried to do physiognomy studies rather than portraits, which is why I tried to give them all the same neutral expression. Some of my naturally happy models I would ask to stop smiling. Others again I would try to relax. And many would sit down and be just right. AA: You have enforced such uniformity, headshots framed exactly the same way, shot from the same angle with the same light, all the models without hair. They seem to be identical at first glance, because of their equal abstract quality. AK: They were designed to work in a group, and not so much as individual pictures. Their identical design was necessary, much as bricks have to be the same size to build a house. If every picture element that you can control is the same, the differences are solely in the faces. Thats why the individual physiognomy and character come through so strongly. AA: How did you find all these people? AK: Some I saw on television or in the New York Times. Others I met in the street, at a club, or restaurant. One day, looking through my window, I noticed this nice guy, he's a sanitation man. He was down there with his huge truck, picking up garbage across the street. My assistant ran down after him to say hello and tell him about our project. LM: What did he say? AK: He was delighted with the idea of being photographed and came to the studio a few days later during his lunch break. But most of the people in Heads I did not discov
