Nadiya Nacorda, *Self Portrait #1-wearing a doek in Lolo and Lola's bathroom*

How did you develop this series?

It started out with me photographing the major sites of my childhood, which included my Lolo and Lola’s house in the suburbs of Detroit, MI. I was curious about what it would mean to make work about my family and the complexities of being an immigrant family in the United States. I have a big family and a lot of people to thank for my upbringing. I was truly raised by a village, so when I started to make work about family I got really overwhelmed. It wasn’t until graduate school at Syracuse University that I began to see the pattern of focus on the women in my family. After that framing, it all sort of flowed from there and I’ve been continuing the work ever since, photographing myself and four generations of women in my family. The project has taken on a new dimension since I gave birth to my daughter last summer, a month after my Nana died. I’m approaching this through a short film piece that is currently in-progress.

What challenges came up during this project?

A ton, I don’t even know where to begin. One of the major ones I’ll articulate is the practical and emotional limitations of photographing the people that are closest to me and have had the greatest impact. My family is fairly spread out in the United States and so I end up having to travel a lot to continue making work. Because of the gaps in time though, I mostly just end up spending time with my family and wanting to just be with them. I’ll leave happy I visited but with almost no images to show for it. In the end, it’s challenging but I don’t mind it when the moment takes over and I never take my camera out. I never want my work to become the dominant point of interaction between myself and my family. If it’s not there and I’m not feeling it, I just accept it.

Describe your creative process in one word?

Water

Nadiya Nacorda, I see you being/myself in you

What inspires you to pursue image-making?

The way I feel when I’m in my flow. When I’m making something I’m feeling really connected to, I truly lose myself in the process. It’s challenging work, no doubt, being an artist, but in general, it simply brings me joy. I love my practice and I operate from a place of making work for myself first. It’s what keeps me going.

What was the last book you read or film you saw that inspired you?

I assigned Daughters of the Dust by Julie Dash for a Black Feminist Art class I taught this year, and in rewatching it after giving birth to my daughter and just becoming a mother in general, it just felt like a new viewing for me and inspired me all over again from a different vantage point. I also recently reread a text by the Black Feminist scholar and theorist Patricia Hill Collins called The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother-Daughter Relationships, and the way she discusses “(other)mothering” and an Afrocentric ideology of motherhood struck me more intensely. I’m reading as the mother now, when previously I was the daughter.

Nadiya Nacorda, *You have your father’s eyes and your mother’s mouth*

What advice would you give to people just starting out in photography?

Get off social media every once in a while, if not more. Make photo friends whose work inspires you and genuinely support each other. Don’t ever give up on yourself and your work. Be open to being wrong. A friend of mine shared with me the Zen Buddhist principle of Shoshin, which is also called Beginner's mind. I think about this a lot in my own practice, that even though I’ve been a photographer in some capacity for almost 15 years, I’m always at the beginning of something.