Color of the Earth

"When a Black child was born, I would hear my mother or other Black women refer to the child's hair as good. They'd say, 'That child has a good grade of hair.' I don't ever recall hearing them say that a child's hair was bad. But between them and television commercials, the concept of good hair was firmly set in my mind. Good hair was hair that was not curly or coarse in texture. Good hair was not difficult to comb. Good hair had waves if you were male, length and manageability if you were female. I thought something was wrong with us...I would grow to learn that we were conditioned to believe that my hair, my family's hair, and anybody's hair that was naturally curly, naturally thick—essentially African—was bad hair..."
— Bill Gaskins

We can unravel so much history from the tightly wound curls of African-American hair; which is why, when I spotted photographer Bill Gaskins' book Good and Bad Hair peeking out from the bookshelf, I quickly snatched it up.

With each eccentric hairstyle that a turn of a page showed me, I saw and heard stories. I knew right away that I wanted to score Bill Gaskins' book of portraits as if it were a movie. "Color of the Earth," which celebrates my heritage as an African-American, was written to a video of individually scanned pages of Bill Gaskins' Good and Bad Hair.