Nye Lyn Tho: Natural Heir

 Natural Heir | Nye’ Lyn Tho

Nye’ Lyn Tho photographs the souls of her subjects. Conscious of the widespread misrepresentation of people of color in mainstream American media, Nye’ aims to create powerful, beautiful, healing stories of and for her community. In Natural Heir she plays on the visual pun of hair and heir—with a celebratory nod at the tradition within the African American community of embracing 

natural hair—articulating a link between hair health and environmental well-being. The fantastical in the images, exuberant natural elements creating a crown that emerges from the mind and heart of the subject, suggests a 

relationship with the literary tradition of magical realism and today’s Afro 

Futurism, a liberatory space that draws on science fiction, technology, and fantasy to allow for the imagining of new black futures.

For this project models were photographed in studio, and then the artist went on to make images of the plant life, composed to reflect her subjects’ nature, and integrate them into the image in post-production. If Nye’ begins with the hope of photographing the essence of her subjects, she then manipulates the images with editing tools to heighten the not-so-apparent story that sits just below the surface. While photography is historically and linguistically about writing with, or capturing the light, Nye’ is interested in discovering and 

rendering the shadows—celebrating them even—in an embrace of darkness. The artist writes about balancing the scales of representation by making work about subjects often overlooked. She merges masculine and feminine, the sharpness of the details in one’s eye against the soft blur of the background, vulnerability against aggression. Since the light gets so much praise and 

glory, Nye’ welcomes the shadows while visually raising the dead.

Nye’ Lyn Tho is a native of New York City, who spent many years in Philadelphia before moving to West Oakland nine years ago. Her degree in architecture gave way to a career in art direction, graphic design, and photography. She worked for a local company for seven years before branching out to start her own business as a photographer.