“I’d get these visions – for example, Simone, pregnant, wearing a fur coat, with honey covering her belly. Even if I didn’t fully understand what they meant, I learned to trust my intuition and nd ways to make them come to life,” she recalls. “To some extent, the process feels magical – the image just appears in my mind – but at the same time, it isn’t coming out of thin air, it is a combination of what I was observing, reading, hearing and thinking.”
Blas is particularly attuned to the way the black woman is perceived, defined, constrained and valued by prevailing social structures and narratives, and wants to push those boundaries. With this series, she endeavoured to make “photos that are about girls dealing with their sexuality and coming to terms with it without making images that are sexual.”
The young women personify characters on a journey of self- discovery and kinship. They are regal and nurturing, strong and inquisitive, autonomous yet connected. “Her storytelling around the lives of black women and girls is fantastical and Afrofuturistic, and begs us to consider notions outside of the status quo,” claims Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, who included Blas in her anthology, Mfon: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. “I love that she celebrates the singularity of girls when society and media encourage them to t a mould. For women and girls, Nydia encourages a reclamation of the body and champions pride and pleasure.”
Indeed, Blas points out the radical potential of the medium: “Photography can lead to the creation of a new world, because we can make images that show another type of world.” She dreams of one “where people are free. Where they get to live full lives. Where they can have access to healthy food, education, clean water, housing.” Until then, our responsibility, she maintains, is to continue to make spaces in our lives, community and work for love and wonder.