Love, You Came from Greatness, a slender monograph by American photographer and Spelman College professor Nydia Blas, explores Black community and family portraiture through a mix of contemporary and archival images. “It is so important to keep saying that there is power in looking,” Blas notes during a conversation documented in the back of the book, “there’s this really special authority that happens when you have a camera.” Esteeming and celebrating the agency of representing oneself, as well as one’s entourage, forms the crux of this project.
The front cover features red silkscreen on gold paper, spotlighting the most impactful image in the book. Two women stand in the grass against a spacious and open backdrop facing in opposite directions; their hair, splayed behind them, is enmeshed in magical connectivity. Connectivity is an emphatic theme in Blas’s works through presenting families from Ithaca, where she grew up—all the more so by situating these denizens within “invitational spaces, intimate spaces, that cross public and private,” like porches and living rooms.
The images are ordinary and unpretentious. Blas qualifies her work as existing “in this interesting space of construction and documentation.” She recurrently features the same subjects, placed in succession in slightly altered arrangements: a family examined as just the parents, then the mother and two daughters, then the four all together, each set against a leafy background, their expressions stern. Through this and other forms of repetition, there’s a sense of not wanting to let go of the moment, of holding tightly onto it—multiplicity becomes a way to claim reality in some stronger, more unyielding way.
Other subjects include women posed in armchairs or in gardens or before lace curtains, emphasizing “the gazes of Black girls and women, creating a powerful space from which to look back.” Concurrent to this gendered frontality, Blas captures other instances where the subjects’ eyes are closed, like one woman against a white wall with her head tilted back, or a girl whose reflection is visible in a ruptured mirror, her face beveled unseeingly towards the sky. “Negating the gaze can create another space of interior experience, where the subject is dealing with herself,” Blas remarks. The photos reflect both the gaze and its refusal.
The artist created this particular body of work thanks to a prompt by the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University as a means of engaging with its historic African American family albums, samples of which are included in the book. Blas’s work is showcased here as the continuation of a legacy of Black representation—one that has, since as far back as the origins of photography, been fragile. In discussion with Blas and scholar Cheryl Finley, curator Kate Addleman-Frankel states: “We have a responsibility to the artifacts and an ethical imperative to do what we can to reconnect them to the communities they’ve been separated from, to activate them in a responsible way.” This sense of activation, and ongoingness, avails the work to a wider exercise of racial recharacterization reclaimed after racist deprivation. Finley notes that the 2006 exhibition After the Deluge at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a presentation of Kara Walker’s output crossed with pieces from the institution’s collections—served as a touchstone for this exercise, mixing works from both personal and establishment sources across epochs.
In addition to vintage images from the Cornell University Library, Blas mingles her own family’s visual lore alongside her contemporary work. Selections from her family albums are reproduced to scale, white-bordered rectangles or original polaroids discolored with age, highlighting generational lineage and the informal nature of portrait photography within the familial context.
The volume concludes with the republication of bell hooks’s powerful and bracing 1995 essay “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,” a cri de coeur that delves into Black identity by way of the vulnerability of representation. The potency of the photographic medium is one hooks insists must not be underestimated: “The camera allowed black folks to combine image making, resistance struggle, and pleasure.” Further, hooks writes that photography’s presence in Black homes as a familial chronicle functions as “a disruption of white control over black images,” providing a “black-owned and -operated gallery space” within a domestic setting. Such self-possession, however mundane, is worth embracing.
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