Ragsdale Beauty Shop/Poodle Cut, Detroit 1951

This is Harry Callahan’s photograph, Ragsdale Beauty Shop/Poodle Cut, Detroit. It’s a photo, of course, and I want to talk about that palette. There's a very specific kind of faded, almost pastel, color going on. It reminds me that every photograph has a color story to tell, even if it seems super realistic, or documentary. Think about the surfaces here. There's glass, which is both reflective and transparent, and the way the neon glows through it, as if from another world. Then there’s the way the barber's pole sits outside the shop, which is a different texture to the signage inside. Callahan has captured all these different textures in one single image. I love how this image shows us how everything, eventually, fades. It makes me think about photographers like Eggleston, or even a painter like Gerhard Richter, who were also interested in capturing a very specific moment in time. The beauty shop is kind of perfect because it shows a certain era, a moment that, like the photograph, has been preserved.