Photography by C. Grant McCool

Weary traveller,
Stress rises, the sun descends.
So does the tired brain.

This is a collaborative project between my friend Kevin Follstad and I. In 2005, Kevin dropped out of UC Berkeley and followed this up with an excellent bout of depression. This manifested itself in the form of unkempt and uncut hair and a minimally trimmed facial forest. On June 15th, 2007, in the evening, the hair all came off. Our friend, Ashley, happened to have a licensed stylist little sister and kindly offered her mom’s kitchen as a setting for “The Haircut”. The next day would be my last haircut for 3 years and my own struggles with depression. I had not previously known that this was a contagious condition.

On June 15th, 2010, this time in our friend, Elishia’s kitchen, and with a different stylist, I received “The Haircut”. This time, Kevin would act as photographer.

The rules of “The Haircut”
1) Full faith and trust was to be placed in the stylist. We no longer knew what we looked like.
2) No mirrors or reflections of any kind. Window curtains were drawn after dark, and bathroom and other mirrors were covered.

This proved to be a very stressful, and uplifting, experience for both of us. For myself, it was sort of like those anti-depressant commercials where it magically becomes a wonderful sunny day. For Kevin, well, 9 or 10 days after his haircut, he met his future wife. The lucky bastard is now living on Hawaii.

I was the policy debate coach at Mercer Island High School (WA) from 2004-2010. Each year we travelled to cities around the country in search of the top competition in this already grueling spoken sport. In 2009 I finally picked up my camera and began documenting the intense world of the high school debater.

The weekend before I cut my hair for the first time in exactly 3 years I found out that the 1st Annual Beard and Moustache Competition was to be held in Bend, OR. It was a sign, a chance gift, like stumbling into a future love by pure happen-stance; I immediately knew that the projection of our personal identity through hair and facial foliage was going to be a lifelong study through photography. Four days later, I got into my blue Subaru Forrester (named Serendipity) and drove to Bend, OR.