Everyone has good hair. This is the opinion of photographer and fourth-generation Portland, Oregon, native Ashley Clark, who can’t seem to get enough of the stuff. More than her own ample ash blonde waves, which reach past her waist, her Tumblr and Instagram feeds are rife with more portraits of hair than just about anything else. “[Each person’s hair] is so different and fascinating,” she explains, making it equally deserving of her camera’s democratic lens. It’s what drew her to photography as a child in the first place—the act of enlivening the familiar or, in her words, “making the everyday not the everyday.” Carrying a camera, she says, “makes everything more magical.”
When capturing the textured curl patterns or flaxen wisps of friends and subjects, Clark is amazed by the way hair is able to convey humor and inspire empathy, a duality she hones with images of tangles of the stuff caught on cactuses, or being threatened by a fork and butter knife. In its movement, it can convey a full range of emotions that are less obvious than those of a straightforward portrait. “Faces give away so much,” she says. But hair has mystery. “Sometimes the questions are more important than the answers.”
And while she’s been known to revel in the beauty of a bald head or micro bob, she finds herself turning her lens again and again toward great, waist-grazing lengths. The relative anonymity of such images—in which faces are fully obscured by heavy curtains of blonde hair—occasionally make it possible to assume that the subject in a particular image is Clark herself, even when it’s not. “I think maybe it’s trying to figure out certain things that I couldn’t [alone] with myself,” she muses of her on-camera doppelgängers. “It’s studying yourself outside of yourself.”
As for her own cascade of fair hair, Clark credits it to her gene pool—and Biotin. Since she started taking the vitamin B complex, she says, “I notice that my hair grows even faster,” which is fine by her. The longer it is, the less she has to think about it. “It’s unfussy. I just let it go crazy and do whatever it wants to.” These days, it’s long enough to pull through openings of her clothes, twist around T-shirts, and even tuck into pants pockets, habits she practices out of nervousness.
Most days, Clark leans into her waves and lets them air-dry, but occasionally she’ll plait her hair on the side, twist it into a top knot, or weave it into French braids or a milkmaid crown that nods to her Swedish heritage. “It just depends on who I want to be that day.” The character she wants to play could change at any time—bangs and a bowl cut have been on the brain, but she doesn’t know who she’ll end up being next. “Sometimes you want to be totally different from what you’ve been before. I don’t know what that’s going to look like yet, but I like to surprise myself.”
“Dove Hair research found that 8 in 10 women feel pressure to wear their hair a certain way. In order to break down the beauty standards that prevent women from loving their hair, and celebrate all hair types, Vogue and Dove have teamed up with real women—not celebrities—to tell their inspiring hair stories. Discover more about Dove’s mission on Pinterest.”
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