Published by Radius Books in 2022, Céline Bodin’s The Hunt is a tightly framed study of women’s hairstyles within Western visual culture. Across 72 pages, Bodin treats hair not as a secondary detail of portraiture but as an image-making material in its own right: shaped, coded and burdened with historical associations. The resulting survey moves among styles drawn from different periods, examining how appearance can signal identity and social position.

The photographs withhold individual biography. Bodin’s figures appear almost sculptural, their hairstyles carrying familiar ideas of sensuality, innocence, discipline, freedom, frivolity and rank. Rather than fixing these associations into a single interpretation, the anonymity of the subjects leaves them open to projection. A coiffure becomes both cultural evidence and imaginative prompt, revealing how quickly viewers turn visual convention into presumed character.

A crucial historical reference is the Victorian hair medallion, an ornamental keepsake made from a loved one’s curl. By recalling this object, Bodin places hair between bodily substance and representation, and connects the series to forms of remembrance that preceded photography. Her images also echo the composure and symbolic distance of classical art: these are less conventional portraits than icon-like constructions, attentive to surface, silhouette and inherited stereotype.

For collectors, the book’s significance lies in the precision of that conceptual structure. Its compact scale and sustained concentration bring together portraiture, material culture, memory and the gendered codes of appearance without dispersing them into a broader social survey. The Hunt merits attention as a focused photographic monograph in which a seemingly decorative subject becomes a rigorous means of considering how Western culture classifies, idealizes and remembers women.