Hairdos of Defiance

Hairdos of Defiance gathers two decades of Ed Templeton's portraits of mohawked strangers, and it treats a single hairstyle as a lens onto punk identity, refusal and belonging across generations.

A former professional skateboarder turned photographer and painter, Templeton shot the portraits on film over roughly twenty years while traveling through the United States and Europe, from Disneyland to Detroit to Scotland, approaching his subjects directly on the street rather than staging them. The book sequences the pictures alongside an essay, On Mohawks, that traces the hairstyle from its origins in indigenous culture through its emergence as a punk identifier and later co-option by the mainstream, closing with its significance to Templeton's own life as an outsider kid growing up in suburbia. Deadbeat Club Press published the first edition, a small-format hardback, in 2018.

The book extends Templeton's long-running practice of documenting youth subculture — skateboarding, punk, suburban California — with the same unposed directness that runs through his other photobooks.