In these two photographs Maud Sulter appears as Jeanne Duval (about 1820–1862). Duval was a Black woman and the muse and mistress of French poet Charles Baudelaire. The title refers to the poem La Chevelure (Hair) by Baudelaire, inspired by Duval. Sulter wrote about her ‘visual fascination’ with Duval who ‘sold her jewels, and possibly her hair, to keep herself and Baudelaire’. On the right Sulter, confronting us as Duval, grips a handful of cut hair and a bag in which the hair would have been packaged in to sell as a fashion accessory. A photographer and poet of Scottish and Ghanaian heritage, Sulter interrogated the representation of Black women in art and literature. Describing her photography, she said: ‘I’m interested in absence and presence in the way that particularly Black women’s experience and Black women’s contribution to culture is so often erased and marginalised. So that it’s important for me as an individual, and obviously as a Black woman artist, to put Black women back in the centre of the frame.’