I’ve been cutting my own hair for about ten years now. It just seemed silly to go to a barber and ask them to use clippers for the whole job when I could do that myself, or so I reasoned. So I got a clipper and some guards of varying lengths and a pair of barber’s scissors.
It turns out it’s not quite that easy: you can’t see in the back and for some reason it’s very hard to get the same consistency of length on the right and left sides towards the back of the head when you’re doing it yourself. I’m also left-handed and of course the barber’s scissors are right-handed, so that leads to some pretty weird contortions at times when I try to do a bit of finishing work and get errant strands that are long or out of place.
One time, I decided on a whim to just take it all off. I was curious about how it would look. It was a bad whim to indulge in the sense that it was January and it just happened to be one of the coldest weeks of the entire decade, with daytime temperatures up and down the East Coast below zero. My timing was also weird in that I was scheduled to join our then-president in New Haven for a presentation to alumni. The last time she and others had seen me in early December, I had a full head of hair. I didn’t calculate how they’d read the look—she immediately took me aside and asked quietly whether I had cancer. I guess I’d just had a full head of hair for so long that I didn’t calculate how startling it was to change up this radically. My family didn’t care for it either, so I haven’t done it again, despite kind of liking the look and feel of it. Some men hate going bald, and maybe I would too if my hair made that choice rather than me.
Anyway, I did want to record how it looked and as self-portraits go, this is aesthetically one of my favorites. My eyes caught just a bit of the light back by the camera position, which is really interesting looking in the eye that’s on the dark side of the shot. I sharpened this one a good deal too, which I think was enhancing in this case. Not sure why my shirt button is undone, though.
All these years of seeing the photo I don't think I noticed the unbuttoned button. It's kind of a nice effect.