Cover image: Laetitia Ky - Beauty and Skin Color (detail)
© Entrée to Black Paris

Can you imagine living in a country full of black women and never seeing one with natural hair?

This is the question Laetitia Ky posed to Nesrine Malik, the woman who interviewed her last year for an article in The Guardian.

I discovered Ky's hair sculptures in multiple of the artist's self-portraits, which were displayed at place de la Bastille during the recent PhotoClimat Biennial.

Laetitia Ky photography exhibition at place de la Bastille
© Entrée to Black Paris

The organizers of the Pole Femmes segment of the event chose to feature Ky as one of two internationally known female photographers whose work would be complimented by photographic representations of women from Ile-de-France created by local female artists. 

Matres Mundi - portraits and landscapes by Camille Gharbi
© Entrée to Black Paris

Re-Belle - portraits and still lifes by Elene Usdin
© Entrée to Black Paris

Les Reines - portraits by Sandra Reinflet
© Entrée to Black Paris

Ky's work is all about self-love, self-respect, and self-determination. She forms her sculptures from wire, thread and extensions woven into her natural hair and photographs herself sporting her eclectic creations. To see several whimsical examples of her art, click HERE.

The photo series that was displayed at place de la Bastille is called Love and Justice, like the book Ky published in 2022. Each self-portrait represents some aspect of womanhood and speaks out against aspects of current culture that diminish, violate, and even eliminate women.

Beauty and Skin Color - Laetitia Ky self-portrait and info panel
© Entrée to Black Paris

The Culture of Rape - Laetitia Ky self-portrait and info panel
© Entrée to Black Paris

Harassment - Laetitia Ky self-portrait and info panel
© Entrée to Black Paris

Ky is an Ivoirian Millennial woman whose initial professional path was business.  After graduating from the Institut national polytechnique Félix Houphouët-Boigny with a degree in business administration, she changed her mind and began pursuing the arts as a career.  Her hair sculptures are not only an expression of her creativity, but also her activism.

During her interview with The Guardian, Ky shared that she suffered from low self-esteem as a child and found her way to natural hair styles after she suffered severe hair loss due to having box braids put into her already relaxer-damaged hair.  At the age of 16, she was inspired by hairstyles she saw in photos of precolonial African women and shaved her head so she could "start over" naturally.

The following is a quote from that article:

“Appreciating my hair let me appreciate other things that made me black.  Like my skin. I’m very dark-skinned and the beautiful Ivorian woman is supposed to be light-skinned. When I started to love my hair, I started to love my skin, and I started to love the fact that I was black. And when I started to love the fact that I was black, it helped me to love the fact that I was a woman. Loving one thing led me to love another thing.”

Ky's life and work are powerful examples of what women can accomplish when they embrace themselves wholeheartedly and unapologetically.  Read the entire extraordinary Guardian article about her HERE.