Gingers of America
The Story So Far
Three weeks touring the US has been so exciting I didn’t post last Monday for the first time in 15 months. I want to reflect on that journey in future posts. This Thursday, if you are in the SoCal area, the tour continues and I will be part of a film screening and panel discussion at the historic Lido Theatre, Newport Beach, OC.
This following interview by Mike Cason of AL.com trigged a flood of applications for the series in Alabama. He tells the story of the work so far and where it is going. The Alabaman portraits are now complete but I aim to find Californian Gingers for portraits this coming Friday 26th and Saturday 27th September in the LA area. Surf dudes, Hollywood wannabes and tech bros, where are you? Apply via GingersofAmerica.com.
Now, to Mike…
Scottish photographer wants portraits of Alabama gingers: Here’s why
By Mike Cason
As Scotland prepared for a national vote on independence from the United Kingdom in 2014, photojournalist Kieran Dodds set out to find ways to define what gave his home country its identity.
One of Dodds’ ideas came from the notion that Scots tend to have red hair.
Dodds began to interview and make portraits of people who fit the stereotype, those who consider themselves ginger.
He learned that people were eager to embrace the trait, which is more common in Scotland than most anywhere else in the world but still includes no more than about 13% of the population.
In September 2014, Scots rejected the move for independence by a vote of 55% to 45%, choosing to remain part of the U.K.
But Dodds was just getting started with the gingers project. Encouraged by the interest it generated, he expanded the work beyond Scotland’s borders.
Dodds is now building a collection called Gingers of America.
He is coming to Birmingham in September as one of the artists with an exhibition at Samford University, “Heading Home, Glimpses of New Jerusalem.”
The exhibition is separate from his gingers project. But Dodds wants to use his first visit to Alabama to add portraits to his work, including, hopefully, some Black Alabamians who carry the trait. He plans to be here for several days starting Sept. 10.
“In some identity politics, we use a trait to isolate ourselves,” Dodds said.
“I’m trying to use it to connect people across the world. And that seems to be what people understand when they see it.”
Dodds finds people who self-identify as ginger through his website.
Those who want to be considered for possible inclusion in the project can upload a photo of themselves and share any relevant family history.
When he started his first gingers project, Dodds said he was inspired by Renaissance paintings that feature ginger characters, including Jesus and Mary, which was intriguing because they were Middle Easterners depicted by artists from southern Europe.
His first book, “Gingers,” published in 2020, included portraits made in Jamaica and in the city of Perm in Russia, as well as the United Kingdom.
In those places, Dodds found ginger people with family connections across Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and east Asia, he said.
Dodds said it is human nature to be intrigued by differences like hair and skin color. He said drawing attention to differences must be done with care, but is worth doing in the right context.
“You’re worried you’re going to step in a sort of a landmine, a conversational landmine,” Dodds said.
“I think it’s good to have these opportunities to remember that we are one human species, one group of people, and interconnections are part of the human story.
“The story of human migration throughout the world is something we should be interested in, and one that transcends political and national boundaries.”
Dodds said the term “ginger” is more descriptive than “red-haired” because of the range of colors resulting from the trait, shades that carry a golden or copper glow.
“It can be from a sort of dark brown with that golden to almost strawberry blonde,” Dodds said. “So there’s a spectrum. Ginger is encompassing that spectrum. I’m fairly broad in my interpretation.”
The ginger is a recessive genetic characteristic. That means families can pass it down invisibly for generations.
Dodds has examples of that in Gingers of America.
They include one portrait of a Native American young woman whose family had no recollection of anyone but Cherokees going back for generations.
“Her hair was this incredible ruby color,” Dodds said. “It’s just a beautiful, dark tone, quite different from other ones. So it really is a global tree.”
Dodds studied zoology at the University of Aberdeen, where he was editor of the student newspaper and earned a degree in 2002. He learned that his favorite part of the academic work was documenting research with photographs.
“To some people, writing comes most naturally, or speaking. But it’s when I’ve got a camera in my hands that I feel that I can interact with the world and start to process it,” Dodds said.
“It’s just the way I encounter the world. When I see something awesome or beautiful or the opposite,” Dodds said.
After college, Dodds became a staff photographer for the Evening Times in Glasgow, where he covered news, sports, and feature projects such as great white sharks in South Africa and evangelist Billy Graham’s final crusade in New York.
His freelance collection, “The Bats of Kasanka,” documenting the migration of millions of fruit bats to Zambia, the world’s largest migration of mammals, won first place in the World Press Photo awards for nature stories in 2006.
Dodds’ first book, “Gingers,” was released in November 2020. He later did a pocket-size version, “The Little Book of Gingers.”
Dodds, who lives in Edinburgh, has a personal connection to the gingers project because he is ginger, as are his twin daughters.
“Sometimes stories come to you and they sort of pull you along. You can’t resist their gravity,” Dodds said.
“People respond to it in a way that I don’t always get for stories I pour time and effort and energy into. And what has intrigued me and kept me going with this story is being able to see different cultures and places.”
On previous trips to America, Dodds has visited Arkansas, Oklahoma, and the East Coast, including New York and Washington, D.C.
Dodds said he got a strong response on a visit to Portland, Ore., where he said hundreds of people wanted to be included.
On his upcoming trip, he plans to make portraits in Tennessee and California, as well as Alabama.
“What I’d love to do in Alabama is find people whose family stories or their story today gives us a glimpse into the story of that part of America, the history, but also contemporary stories,” Dodds said.
Dodds said he wants to ask Americans what unites them, because so much of what is written and said is about the divisions in the country.
“Every time I do these shoots, I just feel like so thankful to meet everyday Americans who just talk about their life, trying to educate their kids, do a job, just have their family around for dinner, just those good everyday things,” Dodds said.
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I love studying about about the migrations of people and culture. This is great. My wife is Greek and told me that the first Greeks were actually fair skinned, blonde, red-headed.
I'm a ginger if you look close. I just finished a fun satire about how it's perfectly acceptable to make fun of us.
A new holiday for gingers!
No need for sparklers. We already glow in the dark ;)
https://open.substack.com/pub/darby687/p/a-new-holiday-for-gingers