Californian photographer Ed Templeton gives us a preview of his upcoming exhibition featuring 20 years worth of photos of the Mohawk
Hailing from southern California, Ed Templeton got into the punk and skateboard scene in 1985. At that time, the aesthetics of rebellion were becoming codified as politics and style become strongly intertwined. Perhaps the most visible symbol of rebellion was Mohawk, a hairstyle that took its name and style from an Iroquois tribe residing in Quebec and New York.
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Composed of a series of carefully crafted spikes of hair running down the center of a shaved head, often dyed bright colors like orange, blue, and green, the Mohawk brazenly respectability politics and polite society. By radically altering their appearances to signify displeasure, disgust, and rejection of the status quo, punks firmly drew a line in the sand, one that squares found intolerable and rude.
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Templeton, however, understood that Mohawks were a message about authenticity in a fake world. In celebration, Roberts Projects in Culver City, CA, presents Hairdos of Defiance, an exhibition of 42 photos made in the U.S. and Europe over the past 20 years accompanied by a book from Deadbeat Club. Like his 1999 book and exhibition Teenage Smokers (Alleged Press), Templeton looks at the ways that kids revel in acts of disobedience to establish their independence and refusal to conform. Here, Templeton speaks about how the Mohawk has become a symbol of opposition, integrity, and self-determination for more than forty years.
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