Eileen Perrier emerged in the 1990s as a photographer who brought the baggage of her diasporic roots (Ghanaian and Dominican) to her lens-based practice to explore questions of place, home and community. In the project featured in Next Level, the Afro Hair and Beauty Show (1998–present), Perrier produces work which merges colour hyperrealism with late twentieth-century studio practices. She approaches her subjects not as spectacles, but as a series of intimate brief encounters, in which she builds a relationship with the sitter that enables them to feel assured and confident about the process they have entered. The result is a series of images which references early African studio work as well as the colour-saturated paintings made in the 1970s by artists such as Barkley L Hendricks, who explored the quintessential fashions and hairstyles of the period as vehicles for social masquerading and self-invention.

Perrier has been visiting the annual Afro Hair and Beauty Show at Alexandra Palace since 1998. She photographs the visitors who attend this event. It’s a day out and everyone’s relaxed; people get dressed up and to this extent, the scene sets itself. But Perrier always identifies an area in which to pose people – a different space each year – from the giant, glossy lips of a cosmetics advertisement in 1998 to the painted mural in the café in 2003, with its incongruous Italianate architecture and strutting peacocks. This is a developing archive of changing trends in fashion and hairstyling and, although the images have the sumptuous light and colour of a fashion shoot, each portrait retains the sense of an individual personality. These are real people, not mannequins and the ‘look’ of catwalk or glossy magazine has been mediated, adapted and personalized by each sitter. — Edited text by Deborah Dean, 2003