Reddy, steady, go for beautiful redheads everywhere
A New Zealand photographer is capturing stunning images of hundreds of redheads in a drive to fight bullying.
Award-winning photographer Bianca Duimel’s first book of portraits featuring 70 redhead models, Red Matters, was a resounding success and helped raise funds for Kidsline.
She is to release her second book this month, featuring 100 portraits of children Duimel hopes will help combat discrimination.
“People just don’t think that bullying redheads is an issue, that it’s a big joke. But it causes a lot of harm and more needs to be done to stop it,” Duimel said.
The artist was looking for a model for a new project when she was struck by the radiant colour of a girl’s hair in her child’s gymnastic class in Counties Manukau.
The subsequent images won awards but Duimel was rocked when the girl’s mother said her daughter had been picked on.
“Her mum was also a redhead and had been bullied all her life for having red hair and just this whole paradox of people loving the red hair but redheads actually being bullied I found it so odd and thought, ‘Gosh, I could do something about this’.”
Duimel thought her art could help break the stigma surrounding red hair and decided to create a book of portraits.
An open call for redheaded models on Facebook in 2016 resulted in almost 700 messages from willing participants.
“It just went insane,” Duimel said. “I ended up photographing 70 people, which was a massive amount of work, but the result was this little book which was gorgeous and sold out pretty quickly.”
Her follow-up book Little Red Matters focused on 100 children from all over New Zealand, from “Invercargill to Whangarei and anywhere in between”. The photoshoots gave the children, many of whom had suffered bullying and name-calling over their hair colour, a major confidence boost, Duimel said.
“They would come to the door and be absolutely beaming and ecstatic that, ‘I’m here because my hair is red and I’m awesome and I’m special’. That got me every time. And later when they saw their portraits, and their parents were so proud, I felt that I had done my job, really. It was a lovely project.” Photoshoots for the third book begin next month, with Tauranga’s arts festival, Escape! setting up a studio for Duimel to photograph subjects during the event. A small portion of book sales goes to Kidsline, New Zealand’s only 24/7 helpline for children and teens.