Malekeh Nayiny was born in 1955 in Teheran, Iran. According to family members, she was a very bad-tempered baby, but she improved a great deal around the age of three. Nayiny loved to play with the ants in our garden. Every day, she would feed them sugar and watch how patiently they would carry each grain back to their homes. It was a group work. She would also save all the worms and insects that she found drowning in our small pool. It was very satisfying for her to see them survive, to spring back to life again.
During the period of her life from about three to six, Nayiny longed to see the imaginary world that my sister would describe each time she put her head under the sheets. She loved to draw and paint, mostly Japanese houses with geishas fanning themselves and Indian chiefs sitting proudly next to their totems. She also enjoyed helping my sister to color her beautiful illustrations.
Nayiny was never good at school; my mind was always somewhere else, normally back in the garden playing. My resulting grades were not very promising, and my parents grew very worried, but I just did not seem to care.
When she turned 16, she insisted that she should be sent to England, as some of her cousins had been. Her family, unwilling, did send her, and it was there that she spent the worst years of my life. She hated her boarding school, and her English was too weak for her to be able to keep up in her classes. It seemed that her only strength was her artwork, but only the imaginative type. Her art teacher, who despised her, would mock her, as she could not draw neither a vase nor a tree.
Nayiny was later sent to Switzerland and enrolled in a mixed school, where they believed she was brilliant and put her straight into an advanced class. It was lots of fun, spending two years in this easy-going school where she got her diploma.
Eventually, with much persistence on her part, she was sent to the States to do her bachelor’s degree. Nayiny was very confused about what she wanted to do as a professional. She longed to be like her father, who was a doctor and helped people to get well. That was her life’s dream–to be useful to others. As she was not very confident in her academic talents, she decided to study textile design and later on photography. Her teachers were very encouraging, and it was a breath of fresh air to experience such positive reactions to her work.
Photography became her passion. Nayiny concentrated on an old technique called photogramme and developed her own style in color. It was a magical and mysterious process for her as it was based on applying transparent materials one could never absolutely predict; one never knew exactly how they would turn out on the paper.
After receiving her BFA, Nayiny longed to return home to Iran, but her parents discouraged her, for the Revolution had taken place. Lacking both enthusiasm and direction, and unsure of where else to go, she moved to New York where she continued to study photography and began to exhibit her work. Nayiny got very interested in doing a project on Coney Island. She loved the surreal quality of that environment and its people and spent countless hours observing the Russian immigrants on the beach, engaging in their eccentric habits.
In 1989 Nayiny moved to Paris. She tried to find a color darkroom in the city, but her attempts were unsuccessful, so, instead, she began a series of paintings on china plates, which to her surprise were very successful. Nayiny continued producing a lot of designs but longed to go back to photography. Several years later, she enrolled in a month-long workshop to learn the graphic design software photoshop and was delighted to be drawn back into the field.
After the death of her parents, she did a photographic project based on her past and forgotten old family photos. It was a success. Many strangers bought her family photos. During one of these exhibitions, she had her most touching and memorable experience: a guard who worked in the museum told her about a woman who often came to view her piece ”Observation”, and, each time, the woman would be very emotional and cry in front of it.
Nayiny’s other projects were centered around the theme of homelessness, and during their production, she became friends with some of the homeless of the city. It was a very rich experience. For her, this series of images, although not as commercially successful, represents her strongest accomplishment.
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