Photoshoppy Stuff :]

For second semester Photoshop class, we were given a brief in which we had to pick a site/place associated with our main studio practice and document the space, with the aim of creating prints that would then be placed in the chosen space.  Because my main studio practice is on religion, I didnt fancy having to spend hours in a church, drawing, taking photos etc as I'd been doing that already.  So I decided for this project to still use religion but in a different way.

I started to look at routine in someone's life, the things they do religiously.  For this, I chose a hairdressers because there are those women who go every single saturday without fail.  So the lovely Kathleen O' Keeffe of Trendy Locks Salon, Abbeyfeale, kindly let me use her salon as my chosen space.  Having gone to the salon for years and having worked there, I knew the place pretty well but it was interesting to just sit there and watch everything.

I started with doing simple sketches of the salon and taking photos of everything there.

 

 

Once the documenting stage was done I started to question why people go and enjoy going to the hairdressers so regularly.  It couldnt be just because they get their hair done or its done out of necessity.  For some customers, especially elderly, you could see that it was the company they enjoyed, the human interaction, the chat over a cut of tea.  That chat with the hairdresser as they do your hair is quite poignant.  People do end up just opening up and telling things to someone who in a way is a stranger to them.  Its been proven that hairdressing is a cheap form of counselling.  Hairdressers in Austrailia have actually been trained to recognise signs of suicide or just plain unhappiness in customers and shown how to help them. 

 

So going with that thought I created some small posters showing how people open up to hairdressers and the counselling aspect of it.  I plan to place these around the salon and see people's reactions when/if they come across them.