Amber N. Ford: The Roads Most Traveled

From cornrows to locs, Black hair is rooted in identity and culture. Within a specific part of history, hair could indicate a person’s tribe, social position, marital status, or occupation. Later, hairstyles told stories of bravery by creating pathways to freedom, using patterns and techniques to relay messages and routes in order to escape in the face of inconceivable duress. Through her work, artist Amber N. Ford explores the importance that hair holds culturally and personally.

This project began as a form of preservation, documenting deconstructed and revised protective hairstyles to remember what was once a piece of her—an alternative approach to self-portraiture. Large-scale photographic prints magnify individual hair strands, twists, tracks, locs, and wigs, creating an immersive experience depicting part of Ford’s lived reality as a Black American woman, using hair as a means of self expression. Each style tells a story and hints at the rich cultural history of hair, which has been used as a means of survival for the enslaved and a form of resistance to make political statements. Her work plays with and centers hair as a cartography of memory, conveying a complex pride and joy in what is fabricated—and what remains—when we shift, change, and construct meanings in our embodied, multiple experiences of Blackness.