A Hackney Hairstory by Fran Cornford

It’s an early afternoon in Hackney on one of those sunless days in autumn and I’m walking around Dalston with my camera. I ‘m looking for hairdressers to take some portraits and more importantly to see what makes this place tick.
The first person I meet is Jummy of Jummy hairdressers ‘You want to take pictures of me?’ most people said when asked to have their picture taken, they seem astounded almost upset but Jummy is different. She’s bursting with energy, the kind that is infectious and it fills the whole salon. Her client grins in her chair, ‘Best hair salon in Hackney’. Looking at Jummy I am in no doubt.
Hairdresser’s salons are about so much more than your hair, it’s about self-expression, feeling good and connecting. With Juju you are instantly connected. She showed me pictures other people had taken in Hackney through the years, ‘I’ve seen a lot, heard a lot of stories, I know a lot of secrets’. I would have been perfectly content sitting there all afternoon hiding from the rain hearing Jummy talk about her life and taking in the sheer mass of memories that her salon was hiding.
But alas I had to carry on my journey and came across some more interesting characters. They too had met a lot of people and had heard a lot of stories but no one had asked them their own. Two hairdressers I spoke to on Mare Street had come across about six months ago from China and made quick work with their clients. ‘The culture here, we love the culture, the people’. Some just talk me through what they were doing ‘He wants something different, something different to his mates, he wants to stand out.’ One kid was getting his hair shaved and he simply said ‘It’s about creating your own identity within your own culture’. He created a whole new persona for himself each time he got his haircut.
Everyone I photograph stood out for a reason whether it was the stories they told of how they got here or why they were working. Ultimately though it was their love of connecting with people that brought them to the salon.