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“The first time that I remember being in the presence of Ara Gallant was in Richard Avedon’s studio on 75th Street in New York City, circa 1971. We were in the middle of a photo shoot with Dick, and Polly Mellen was the fashion editor and Ara was “doing hair.” Ara was never a hairdresser; his talent didn’t fit into the normal concept of what hairdressing might be--Ara always ‘did hair’--and suddenly Ara’s hands came alive and he started attaching yards of vinyl braid to my head with swift, deft fingers. Ara had a very sure touch. We were perusing images of handsome young men of the moment (one of them was James Taylor, but we didn’t choose him because we hadn’t heard his music yet) whom Dick had thought might be a potentially good pairing for me on an upcoming shoot for Vogue in Connemara, in the heart of the Emerald Isle. Ara had just confessed his deep and abiding hatred for the color green, he said he wouldn’t even drive a green car if you paid him, and we were laughing so hard that I barely noticed that he had plucked my eyebrows into a whisper of a line, half way up my forehead--I was aghast, but said nothing. Ara was subversive like that; he would perform tricks when you weren’t looking, and the results were often worrisome, if generally very glamorous: with Ara, it was not so much about hair and much more about the creation of a fantasy…” Anjelica Huston, excerpted from her Introduction to Ara Galant.
“The first time that I remember being in the presence of Ara Gallant was in Richard Avedon’s studio on 75th Street in New York City, circa 1971. We were in the middle of a photo shoot with Dick, and Polly Mellen was the fashion editor and Ara was “doing hair.” Ara was never a hairdresser; his talent didn’t fit into the normal concept of what hairdressing might be--Ara always ‘did hair’--and suddenly Ara’s hands came alive and he started attaching yards of vinyl braid to my head with swift, deft fingers. Ara had a very sure touch. We were perusing images of handsome young men of the moment (one of them was James Taylor, but we didn’t choose him because we hadn’t heard his music yet) whom Dick had thought might be a potentially good pairing for me on an upcoming shoot for Vogue in Connemara, in the heart of the Emerald Isle. Ara had just confessed his deep and abiding hatred for the color green, he said he wouldn’t even drive a green car if you paid him, and we were laughing so hard that I barely noticed that he had plucked my eyebrows into a whisper of a line, half way up my forehead--I was aghast, but said nothing. Ara was subversive like that; he would perform tricks when you weren’t looking, and the results were often worrisome, if generally very glamorous: with Ara, it was not so much about hair and much more about the creation of a fantasy…”
Anjelica Huston, excerpted from her Introduction to Ara Galant.
Published by Damiani. Edited and with text by David Wills. Introduction by Anjelica Huston.
He was born Ira Gallantz in 1932 in the Bronx, but later changed his name to the more exotic-sounding Ara Gallant—and the life he led was indeed an exotic one. Gallant began his professional career in fashion as a hairdresser, working at Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York as one of the city's top colorists. In the mid-1960s, he was approached by Vogue and began to work exclusively on photo assignments, the first hair stylist to be paid to fulfill such a role. Gallant went on to work with many of the great fashion photographers of the period, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Bert Stern among them. Perhaps his most notable contribution as a stylist was the introduction of “flying hair,” an effect he first used on an Avedon shoot with iconic model Twiggy in 1966, and which is still widely employed today. By the early 1970s, Gallant had begun shooting his own pictures, his first assignment being a set of celebrity portraits for Interview magazine. His work often juxtaposed classic Horst-like compositions with contemporary scenarios. In the early 1980s, Gallant moved to Los Angeles to pursue a directing career, which never happened; in 1990, he committed suicide in a Las Vegas hotel room. This new book tracing Gallant's life and career is edited by David Wills and features photographs by Richard Avedon plus a foreword by Anjelica Huston.
