Ginger hair portraits show unexpected 'golden thread' connecting Americans

What the report says

BBC World News reports that Edinburgh photographer Kieran Dodds has turned a decade-long fascination with red-haired people into a new book, Gingers of America, which focuses on ginger-haired Americans and the family histories behind them. Dodds, who describes himself as a ginger, first built the project in Scotland and then expanded it to places including Russia and Jamaica before realizing he had overlooked the United States.

The article says that once he began asking around, many people in America came forward to be photographed and interviewed. His subjects include members of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma, a Comanche girl with Scottish grandparents, and families in Alabama and Virginia whose backgrounds reflect a mix of Indigenous, European, African-American and Hispanic ancestry. Dodds said some cases involved obvious links to Scots or Irish heritage, while one Cherokee subject appeared to have no known European connection, which he found especially striking.

Dodds uses the term “ginger” as a descriptive label and says the book treats red hair as a connecting thread across a country shaped by migration, intermarriage and shifting identities. In the BBC’s telling, the project is both a portrait series and a broader look at American diversity, with red hair serving as the entry point for questions about ancestry, belonging and how people define themselves.