John Lucas and Claudia Rankine

Sheet 5 (stamped series)

Historically, blondeness has been a signifier for desirability and beauty, speaking to “purity” — the purity of whiteness — like no other bodily attribute except, perhaps, blue eyes. In the twenty-first century, blondeness is the look desired by American presidents, pop stars, rappers, television announcers, Hollywood celebrities, the boy next door, and some Asian Americans, African Americans, white Americans, Arab Americans, and LatinX Americans. The desirability of blonde hair has no genre boundaries, no pronoun limitation, and no class limit. Whether one is a bottle blonde or regularly goes to the salon, blondeness is ubiquitous. 

In Sheet 5 from the series Stamped, filmmaker and photographer John Lucas and writer Claudia Rankine collaboratively capture photographs of dyed blonde hair as seen on the heads of strangers and acquaintances. These images — zoomed in and cropped — are framed as still images and also transposed onto real postage stamps. The stamp, a form of currency with inherent mobility, becomes a metaphor for questioning value and utility.