“Corporate Portraits of White Women With Black Hairstyles”

“I said, ‘I am going to give you a black hairstyle,’ and they were like, ‘You’re going to give me cornrows?’ ” Beal recalled of her conversations with her subjects. “And I said, ‘No, we’re going to do finger waves.’ ‘Finger waves? What’s that? You mean from the ’20s?’ And I said, ‘These are a little bit different type of finger waves!’”

-Behold, Slate’s photo blog, features a series of portraits of older white women with black hairstyles from photographer Endia Beal’s series, “Can I Touch It?” Beal tells David Rosenberg her work is about self-expression, “specifically in a corporate environment”: “I wanted people that had a certain idea of what you’re supposed to look like in the workspace, because it would be a challenge for them to understand what I experienced in that space.” In an earlier project, after being told that some of her white, male coworkers had talked about touching her hair, Beal had them do exactly that, and then recorded them talking about the experience. [Behold]