Nydia Blas: Love, You Came from Greatness - Hardcover

Nydia, Blas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1733497145 ISBN 13: 9781733497145

Publisher: Image Text Ithaca, 2025

Synopsis

A loving and powerful photobook following the lineage of one Black family, interrogating the semiotics of family portraiture

This profoundly moving and visually ravishing photobook, the first major monograph by American photographer Nydia Blas (born 1981), is an exploration of one Ithaca-based Black family and its community across many generations. The book is also a formally rigorous examination of the taxonomy and syntax of family portraiture.
Blas' contemporary works are integrated with selections from her historical family albums in order to tell an extended intergenerational story, and to bring forward the evolving and recurring nature of the portrait photograph throughout the medium's history. Deploying doubling, repetition and more subtle echoing and mirroring, Love, You Came from Greatness builds a powerful line of feeling and thought across generations and photographic tropes and styles. It features an illustrated discussion among Blas, curator Kate Addleman-Frankel and Cornell art historian Cheryl Finley. The volume concludes with the republication of bell hooks' seminal 1995 essay "In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life," a deeply personal text that expands on crucial themes of family, photography, and Black identity and community.

About this title

From the Back Cover

A loving and powerful photobook following the lineage of one Black family, interrogating the semiotics of family portraiture.

This profoundly moving and visually ravishing photobook, the first major monograph by American photographer Nydia Blas (born 1981), is an exploration of one Ithaca-based Black family and its community across many generations. The book is also a formally rigorous examination of the taxonomy and syntax of family portraiture.

Blas' contemporary works are integrated with selections from her historical family albums in order to tell an extended intergenerational story, and to bring forward the evolving and recurring nature of the portrait photograph throughout the medium's history. Deploying doubling, repetition and more subtle echoing and mirroring, Love, You Came from Greatness builds a powerful line of feeling and thought across generations and photographic tropes and styles. It features an illustrated discussion among Blas, curator Kate Addleman-Frankel and Cornell art historian Cheryl Finley.

Edition details

• Publisher: Image Text Ithaca
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1733497145
• ISBN 13: 9781733497145
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 130