Nydia Blas explores Black power and pride via family portraits

Growing up in the predominantly white college town of Ithaca, New York, photographer and educator Nydia Blas found kinship among family photographs hung on the walls. 

Blas’s family arrived in Ithaca a century ago, settling into the historically Black neighbourhood of Southside which was home to a stop on the Underground Railroad. The community has nurtured a wealth of extraordinary talents including Alex Haley, Malcolm X​’s biographer, Civil Rights activist Dorothy Cotton, Bishop Cecil A. Malone, and Beverly J. Martin (Blas’s aunt), for whom a local elementary school is named. 

Despite being steeped in history, as a small town of 32,000, where less than 7% is Black, Blas remembers, ​“I grew up in the ​’80s and ​’90s, and did not see myself too often in the place where I lived even though my family has been here over 100 years. We had beautiful photographs, formal portraits of my grandparents and great grandparents, and a lot of candid pictures that I saw as physical proof I came from greatness.”

Blas fell in love with photography as a teen, put her dreams on hold after becoming a mother and wife at 18 but she simply could not escape her fate. After receiving a digital camera as a gift in her mid 20s, she went on a trip to Guatemala, where she discovered her true calling and never looked back.

“The roles of mother and artist have always been intertwined because I didn’t have a choice,” says Blas. ​“By that time I was a single mother and I had to make life work, which may be why I first started photographing my kids, nieces, cousins, and friends. I was photographing people I felt close to because I think of the work as collaborative.”

With the publication of Love, You Came From Greatness (Ithaca Press), her first major monograph, Blas now returns to where it all began: Ithaca, past and present.

The project took root in 2021, when she received a commission from the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University to create a new body of work, in response to a collection of 18 family photo albums that chronicle the lives of Black families around the nation between 1860s – 1980s.

Blas, who now lives in Atlanta, returned to Ithaca during the summer of 2022 and 2023 to photograph family and friends, crafting scenes that sparkled with the promise of paradise on earth. She then seamlessly weaved archival photographs drawn from her family albums along with those at Cornell throughout, crafting an intimate, intricately layered portrait of Black American family life suffused with mystery, power, poetry, and love.

“The core of my work is my love for people of African descent, and I wanted to use photography to talk about Black culture, Black history, sexuality, women, all of these things, in a poetic way. This world is really hard and heavy, but it’s also beautiful and magical. I think the best photography poses questions; it doesn’t answer them.”

Love, You Came From Greatness by Nydia Blas is published by Ithaca Press.

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