This is what I was explaining in earnest to the renowned photographer and documentarian Bruce Weber, the man behind the lens of a multitude of iconic and controversial fashion and celebrity images that span back to the eighties, when he shot a young Richard Gere for Calvin Klein. He has a reputation as a daredevil—an artist who takes his subjects and their viewers on trips that are all at once sexual and sensual, quiet but in-your-face electric, risky, and, on the most provocative pages, a smidge scandalous. I was beyond excited to find out that Bruce would be the photographer to shoot me for a high-fashion spread for CR Fashion Book, the biannual style magazine, as inspired by Carine Roitfeld, the global fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar. The pitch was to document my “empire” in a series of shots featuring a small army of eye candy, including Jussie Smollett; the baller Michael Beasley; the music director and bandleader for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jon Batiste; and the model Henry Watkins. My mission was to look like a smoldering cauldron of chocolate so hot, it would singe the fingertips of the CR Fashion Book readers and melt the screen of anyone who watched Bruce’s short documentary of the shoot.
Bruce had something different in mind, though, inspired by something he was not meant to see: my hair before I got into the stylist’s chair. I had it braided down in a weave pattern, which I tend to keep for a good eight months out of the year to protect my hair from the overstyling that comes with the job; the braids, cornrows that lie flat against my scalp, make it super-easy to switch from wig to wig and look to look without having to manipulate my thick, natural hair, which, surely, would break off from all the heat and styling products needed to keep it camera ready. The only time I take the braids out is to wash and condition my hair, clip the ends, and let it breathe a little to keep it growing and healthy, and the only time anyone ever sees the cornrows is if my braider is putting them in or my hair stylist is fitting me into a wig. But on this particular day, as I was slipping into a myriad of outfits to have them approved by Bruce for the photo shoot, the scarf under which I was hiding my weave braids slipped off my head. That scarf floated to the floor in slow motion and Technicolor, like some kind of bright leaf caught in the sweep of a gentle breeze. My scream was loud and guttural: “Oh my God! Nooooooo!” I knew I looked good and crazy, standing there barefaced with my black-girl weave braids crawling all over my head, so I did what I know to do in the heat of a sticky situation: I played it off. I tipped my head in Bruce’s direction and started bragging on the skill of my hair braider Kendra. “Go ahead and look at ’em,” I said, smiling extra hard. “Looks like a basket, doesn’t it? It’s incredible. Kendra’s hands are touched by God.”
Bruce leaned in, took a close look, and said: “Great! We’ll shoot that.”
I’m sure my brows, furrowed enough to be a braid in and of themselves, betrayed my horror at the mere thought of being seen like this in front of Bruce, Carine, and all those fine men on our set, much less having the look documented in the pages of one of the fiercest fashion magazines around. But Bruce gave my “What? Oh, no, no, no, no, no!” zero energy. “Your hair is perfect exactly the way it is,” he insisted.
“Bruce. Bruce! Hey, Brucey!” I said, snapping my fingers to get him to focus on the words coming out of my mouth. “This is not the hair people look at, you know what I mean? This is not what the world needs to see. When we put the wig on, that’s what they see. This is like a wig cap, you know? You don’t put this in a magazine.”
My pleading was futile; Bruce was nonplussed. “Of course it’s perfect for the magazine. It’s not about your hair, it’s about your face. It’s beautiful.”
Moments later, Carine walked in and cosigned Bruce. “Yes, I love it! Beautiful! Let’s go! Go to makeup.”
I immediately broke out in a sweat and started walking around in circles, talking to myself, trying to figure out how to get out of this particular pickle. I mean, I’d just come off of incredible cover shoots with W magazine, Glamour, and Allure, high-fashion beauty bibles. Their work was stellar, and I was honored to represent for black women, who rarely get to see someone who looks like them peeking from mainstream newsstands in such a big way all practically at the same damn time. And now the photographer and the editor in chief of CR Fashion Book, a delicious magazine everybody in the fashion industry checks for when it comes out twice a year, was going to see to it that I looked like a plucked, bald rat, slithering around all these fine men? My confidence was being tested that day, and though I’ll be the first to borrow from the rapper Bone Crusher in saying, “I ain’t neva scared!” the idea of being photographed this way had me shook. I could just see the memes floating across my Instagram and Twitter timelines: my head, looking all kinds of crazy, with the words “When Cookie Gets Her Wig Snatched!” and “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong” written in bold letters across the top. We women put so much stock into our hair; it is our crown and glory—the perfect punctuation to our style and beauty. Looking like this in the fashion spread, I was convinced, would not end well.
Jussie, bless his heart, was over in the corner, lifting me up with praises—“But you’re beautiful! Stop worrying”—and my publicist chimed in with more of the same: “Your face is gorgeous, look at you!” and that was helpful, kind of. But after everyone stopped blowing smoke up my ass, and I did a shot or two of tequila, I forced my mind to stop thinking like Taraji the fashionista and look at the situation like Taraji the artist: “You have to trust the process,” I kept saying to myself again and again as I paced. I saw that twinkle in Bruce’s eye—that artist’s glimmer. He was inspired. Who was I to question his art? I had to approach the photo shoot not as a woman who wanted to look pretty, but as a character, the way I did when I showed up to my Hustle & Flow audition looking like a broken-down, greasy dust bucket to win my part as Shug. Trust the process, I repeated. Go there.
I did, and Bruce’s photos are inspired. It was in those moments, when I was bare and vulnerable, that I did some of my best work. It didn’t hurt that all those gorgeous men were helping me along, so sweet and delicate in their handling of me. I was most nervous with Beasley because he’s a basketball player; I know the kinds of girls he likes looking at, and you can best believe they’re not prancing around him in sew-in weave braid patterns. Earlier he’d been gushing about seeing all my movies, and now he was sitting next to me in the hair and makeup room, seeing me this way. Working through that was tough. “I feel so raw, exposed,” I told him.
“You’re beautiful. Look at you!” he said. “We men don’t care about all that hair. This is what we want to see.”