My Hairdressing Diary, Part 2
Making the wings was the easy part. Now I had to find a photographer who could fit into my budget, and a model who would be willing to strip down to nakedness and then by painted from head to toe. I also had to devise a formula that would color the hair a matching shade of gray. I located a photographer, or to be more exact, a photography student from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. This worked out well because student photographers will work for free since it allows them to build up their portfolios. At the same time, a student has full access to a wide variety of equipment that most local photographers do not have. All I had to do was pay for the cost of supplies.
Since the shoot would be held in Rochester, I scoured New York looking for models. I found two willing volunteers at a college in Potsdam. I was organizing all of this from Pennsylvania, so I would not have a chance to meet with the models until the time of the shoot. One model would be the Stone Angel, and the other one would be used for a different idea, which originally involved vines and sticks and twigs...an interpretation of the Creation. I bought or made all of the supplies, loaded them into the trunk of the car and then drove to Potsdam to meet the models on Saturday, just one day before the planned date of the shoot.
I had a hard time finding the girls, since it was a college campus on a Saturday night, so I had even less time on my hands to work with. I originally wanted to the the initial haircutting and coloring on Saturday night, then have all day Sunday to drive to Rochester, do the make-up, and shoot the rest of the day. But as we all know, things never go according to plan. The models showed up after midnight, and it was obvious that they would be quite hungover by morning. I seriously considered scrapping the whole idea. My girlfriend (who was also my assistant) and I stayed at the college dorm that night, posing as college students. In the morning, we set out for a four hour drive to Rochester, looking for Liz's apartment (she was the student photographer I used for the project). I had never been to Rochester
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