Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Saturday Girl exhibition hits Liverpool
Dr Casey Orr’s Saturday Girl project is funded by our University’s Media and Place research cluster and the Centre for Culture and the Arts, and with help from students from the BA (Hons) Graphic Arts and Design course.
Casey will be photographing the women of Liverpool on Saturday 2 May and Saturday 9 May in The Dome at the Liverpool One shopping centre.
These new portraits will be made into a publication for distribution throughout the venues of the Look Liverpool International Photography Festival, taking place from 15-31 May. As part of the festival, Casey’s pop up studio will be open to photograph anyone visiting the festival on Sunday 24 and Monday 25 May.
Casey explained: “Saturday Girl is a series of portraits of young women – teenagers – specifically as seen through their hairstyles. It is an exploration of hair and its cultural meaning for young women, and how we experience and use the power inherent in becoming visible as women. Saturday Girl was conceived after seeing so many young women in Leeds with ‘big hair’; hair teased and back-combed, styled and extended with hairpieces and wigs. I wondered what it meant, what it said about undercurrents in culture, the unspoken signs that tell of our values and tribe identities and how these things burst forth (whether we intend them to or not) in self-expression.
“As women we have always dyed and cut, woven and braided, sprayed and shaved; as a way of both stating our individuality, belonging to a tribe and expressing our sexuality. The Saturday Girl teens, bursting with shocking self-styled expression against their primary-coloured backdrops, remind us that hair both informs and transforms.
“The powerful relationship between photography and self is present in Saturday Girl as the series comments on how we see ourselves, present ourselves and remember ourselves. Photography is now ever-present and ever-public, and through a constant companionship with this ubiquitous friend, we construct who we are; our presentation and our image.
“These photographs, unlike so many images we see of young women, refuse to become either the clichéd portraits of advertising or the porn-mimicking aesthetic we’ve been handed. Coded, and revealing of other clues to self, the Saturday Girl portraits reveal the unintended.”
Casey launched the Saturday Girl project in February 2014 with an exhibition of her portraits of young women in Leeds held at the Leeds Gallery Munro House.