The African American photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier is a self-described “cultural agent.” She explains, “My job is to come in and stir the pot, or cause some type of other change or inclusion at the institutional level. But I also know what I’m responsible or accountable for being an example in communities that are completely marginalized and ostracized from these types of events. And I do that by always building workshops and arts education programs around each exhibit that I do. Putting the work up isn’t where it stops; it’s where it begins.”[1]
Frazier was inspired by her mentors and teachers Kathe Kowalski, Doug DuBois, Carrie Mae Weems, and Peggy Cooper Cafritz, the latter of whom was her first patron.[2] She is currently assistant professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She earned her BFA in applied media arts from Edinboro University in Pennsylvania and an MFA in art photography from Syracuse University. Frazier participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in 2010–11 and has held academic and curatorial positions at the Yale University School of Art, Rutgers University, and Syracuse University. She is an Assistant Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was also an artist-in-residence at the Braddock (Pennsylvania) Carnegie Library, a place that Black people were not even allowed to enter when her grandmother was a child. In fact, this residency marked Frazier’s first time past the first-floor stacks.[3]
Born in 1982 in Braddock, Frazier has been engaged in the arts in some capacity since the age of six, when she began drawing and painting. She discovered her passion for photography when she took pictures of her classmates with a disposable camera during her senior year of high school with a disposable camera.[4] Her first portrait was of her cousin for a photography course, and Kowalski encouraged her to take photos of her mother for an undergraduate class.[5] Family has remained an integral aspect of Frazier’s work: “My mother became an active participant; she became an artist herself. Her voice and her images are incorporated in the work. We started making videos together. My grandmother was always a collaborator as well, making images. The works are self-portraits. But I view the three of us as one entity that exists in the vortex of Braddock’s history.”[6] Frazier’s family was involved in directing and shooting her autobiographical series The Notion of Family (2001-14), which also includes images of the landscape as commentary on the experiences of intense air pollution and gentrification in Braddock. Her work on her hometown underscores the impact and lived realities of the industrial revolution and the subsequent closing of steel mills on working-class families.[7]
Frazier’s work disrupts the trope of an omniscient narrator and instead has a more participatory style that involves her subjects on both sides of the camera, even as photographers themselves. She reflects: “I believe in and am deeply invested in how formal qualities of light, shadow, and texture appear within the subject of my prints. I use these qualities to convey mood, feeling, and emotion in addition to the content itself. There is also a subtle balance of surrealism and realism in each image I am looking for; a portal or slippage between what is rendered real and not real; the reality of what is physically in front of my camera versus the darkness in the atmosphere that surrounds me.”[8]
PMA Library
References
Biesenbach, Klaus, Cornelia H. Butler, and Neville Wakefield. 2010. Greater New York 2010. Exh. cat. Long Island City, NY: MoMA PS1.
Cafritz, Peggy Cooper, ed. 2018. Fired Up! Ready to Go!: Finding Beauty, Demanding Equity: An African American Life in Art; The Collections of Peggy Cooper Cafritz. New York: Rizzoli Electa.
Frazier, LaToya Ruby. 2014. The Notion of Family. With contributions by Dennis C. Dickerson and Laura Wexler. New York: Aperture Foundation.
Johnston, Frances Benjamin, Sarah Hermanson Meister, and LaToya Ruby Frazier. 2019. Frances Benjamin Johnston: The Hampton Album. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
Lindquist, Greg, and Charles Schultz. 2017. “LaToya Ruby Frazier with Greg Lindquist and Charles Schultz, 2013.” In Tell Me Something Good: Artist Interviews from the Brooklyn Rail, edited by Jarrett Earnest and Lucas Zwirner. New York: David Zwirner Books.
Ravich, Nick. 2018. “LaToya Ruby Frazier.” In Being an Artist: Artist Interviews with Art21, edited by Tina Kukielski. New York: Art21.
Endnotes
[1] Quoted in Lindquist and Schultz 2017,134.
[2] Cafritz 2018; Frazier 2014.
[3] Frazier 2014; Johnston, Meister, and Frazier 2019; Ravich 2018.
[4] Biesenbach, Butler, and Wakefield 2010; Frazier 2014; Johnston, Meister, and Frazier 2019; Ravich 2018.
[5] Frazier 2014; Lindquist and Schultz 2017.
[6] Quoted in Ravich 2018, 38.
[7] Biesenbach, Butler, and Wakefield 2010; Ravish 2018.
[8] Frazier 2014, 152.
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