Ho Tam

Running concurrently with Social Photography, Ho Tam’s, Haircut 100 documents the many barbershops and hair salons throughout New York City’s Chinatown. Published as a book in 2015, with maps of the barbershops and the salons’ locations and interviews with employees, Haircut 100 catalogs an industry that is a mainstay of the neighborhood while offering geographic specificity that differentiates the characteristics of each street and block.

Ho Tam’s project serves as a kind of informal travelogue of Chinatown, offering a playful and engaging document of an everyday service whose rich idiosyncrasies might go unnoticed to people from outside the neighborhood. Producing a block by block photo archive of a subset of essential commercial activity, Haircut 100 incorporates the sensitivity of Jane Jacob’s classic urbanism and the meandering logic and mapping of the Situationists.

Presented in a mural format directly on the wall of the gallery and incorporating the photographs, descriptions, interviews, and maps found in the book, Haircut 100 emphasizes the richness of locality and site, while drawing parallels to the many cell phone pictures in Social Photography which highlight the interest that can be found in a close scrutiny of one’s everyday surroundings.