“Everyone has a hair story, even people who initially say they don’t,” says Rohina Hoffman, MD, a neurologist who is now a fulltime fine arts photographer and whose latest project is a coffee-table-style book called Hair Stories (Damiani, 2019). “If you say you just wake up and brush your hair and go, that tells the world something about you.”

Hoffman, who received her undergraduate and medical degrees from Brown University, also took courses at Rhode Island School of Design while a student. “I was always the person with the camera,” she says.

After finishing medical school, Hoffman, who was born in India and grew up in New Jersey, moved west to do neurology training at UCLA. She was a practicing neurologist for years before deciding in 2012 to focus on photography full-time. She found her medical training an asset in her new field of work.

“Both professions are about trust and connection. I found I was good at dealing with people, and that comes from being in medicine for so long,” she says. “I used the observational skills I learned as a neurologist—how patients walk into a room, the gestures they make, how they talk, whether they move their facial muscles subconsciously—to make them feel comfortable and establish trust. Those skills were quite useful when I started interviewing subjects for photography.”

Hoffman’s interest in dedicating a book to women and their hair was sparked when she did a photography project about mothers and daughters and noticed the mothers would often arrange or smooth their daughters’ hair. Sometimes these touches seemed affectionate and helpful—a pat or gentle brushing of flyaway strands—but in other cases, they seemed invasive and unwelcome.

These reminded Hoffman of her own hair story: When she was 7, her mother cut off her two pigtails, leaving her with very short hair. “My mother did it possibly to make her life easier, but it was humiliating for me,” recalls Hoffman. “In the 1970s, if you had short hair, you were labeled a boy.”

The women Hoffman spoke with inspired her introductory words in the book: “Hair is a language, a shield, and a trophy. Hair is a construct reflecting our identity, history, femininity, personality, our innermost feelings of self-doubt, aging, vanity, and self-esteem. Hair also has deep sociological roots. It can be indicative of a certain religious or political belief system and like its genetic code, is complicated and touches our very core.”

Hoffman’s project is more than a book. On the website womenshairstories.com, she includes audio excerpts from interviews with her subjects. Susan, for example, who died of breast cancer in 2019, describes the disconcerting process of losing her hair before she recognized it as a potent and positive symbol of her cancer diagnosis. Joanne, who also lost her hair after chemotherapy for breast cancer, tells Hoffman how important her long hair is to her identity and sense of herself. In her taped interview, Kelly Baker, whose hair went from straight to curly as a result of epilepsy medication, says having “a Brillo pad of hair” in high school was her worst nightmare. Thanks to a stylist and a new perspective, Baker embraces her curls today.

For more about how neurologic disorders can affect hair, read How to Deal with Hair Loss Caused by Medication.