As Footscray undergoes rapid change, some things are hair to stay.
Gentrification’s march is yet to overtake the suburb’s hairdressers and barbershops that provide lasting snapshots of every new wave of migration.
Footscray photographer Noah Thompson has spent three years documenting the people behind the snips and styles, cuts and curls, bringing it all together in a new book and exhibition.
Thompson said Footscray Hair was a celebration of Footscray’s cultural diversity and standing as a centre for newly arrived Australians.
“I just noticed there were all these different barber shops – Italian places through to Vietnamese places and, more recently, the Indian, Somali and South Sudanese,” he said.
“It seemed like an interesting way of talking about migration, to Footscray and Australia.”
Originally from Darwin, Thompson has been living in Footscray for five years.
The Footscray Hair project began taking shape in 2015, the exhibition coming together with the help of an arts grant from Maribyrnong council.
Thompson first became serious about photography in high school and has recently returned to study the form.
“I’m mainly interested in documentary photography,” he said. “I’m interested in ideas of community, in social and political and environmental phenomena.”
This has led to his involvement in the Behind the Wire project, sharing the stories of men, women and children who have spent time in mandatory detention.
His work is currently on display in the ‘They Cannot Take the Sky’ exhibition at the Immigration Museum and he was also recently shortlisted for the National Photographic Portrait Prize 2017, opening at the National Gallery in Canberra on April 1.
The Footscray Hair exhibition will open from 6pm on Wednesday, April 26, at Trocadero Art Space, Level 1, 119 Hopkins Street, Footscray, and run until May 13.
Books will be available for purchase for $25 for the duration of the exhibition.
