Silver Linings

Obliged—or enabled—by the pandemic to go gray, other subjects whom Carucci photographed also reckoned with transformation. Lauren Katzenberg, who is thirty-five, started going gray at sixteen. “I would sit by the mirror and pluck them out, but by the time I was in college there were too many to pluck out,” she said. Shut up at home last year, she learned to appreciate what she had so self-consciously sought to hide. Carucci pictured Pamela Gontha, who is forty-seven, from behind, her hair a luxurious curtain: new growth of gunmetal gray giving way to russet and then to luscious black at the deep-dyed tips. “It was almost like breaking an addiction,” Gontha said, of giving up her at-home coloring routine. “I don’t miss that smell—especially the first day you go to bed and you can’t escape it on your pillow.”

For Sabrina Spencer, who is forty-seven, unleashing a streak of silver was a statement of kinship. “I have many cousins who have it in the same place, so I started to leave it in, because it identified me with my family, in a way,” she said. Munirah Alatas-Khalifa, who is eighty, had been coloring her hair for more than thirty years. In Carucci’s portrait, her elegant features are illuminated by a nimbus of silver, with remnants of brown behind: “My friend said, ‘But why? You look old.’ I said, ‘I’m not exactly young.’ ”

If you were among the lucky and the relatively unscathed, Covid was a pause—a time for reflection (not just in the mirror of Zoom), even a time for growth (not just of unsightly roots). For Sausan Machari, who is forty-two, letting her abundant hair return to its natural coloration was part of a larger process of change. “Before Covid, especially in New York, we were always planning,” she said. “Now it’s just about getting comfortable with the flux, and riding the wave wherever it may go.”