A Haircut for Emily, photography, 2020

 

Around this time last year, my sister asked me to cut her hair. It was a few months before quarantine, when people were required to stay inside and had to make do with at-home haircuts; for us it was normal, it was just how we were. These photographs, a literal documentation of the process, are imbued with a sense of intimacy: in one frame, she sits on the ledge of our bathtub, hair parted down the middle, in the other, we see clumps of hair flecked across the floor, meandering under the bed, under a pair of house slippers. Through this incredibly personal lens, A Haircut for Emily portrays the tender moments shared between siblings; a visual marker for the closeness of our friendship, of unseen moments from the past year in our narrow shared room.