‘I’ve Used My Camera as a Compass’
Cultured Magazine
by LaToya Ruby Frazier
LaToya Ruby Frazier Shares the Tenets Behind Her Practice—and First MoMA Show
As her exhibition “Moments of Solidarity” opens for previews, the artist-activist shares her accompanying credo exclusively with CULTURED. Here, Frazier outlines the origins, timelines, and influences behind the 23 years of work on view in the expansive show.
LaToya Ruby Frazier. Photography by Sean Eaton. Image courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art.
I am not a carbon copy of anyone, just as you are not a composite of your mother, father, grandparents, siblings, or extended relatives. The self-portrait you see—the image of your presence—will be the life you live. Part of the root of the word photograph is phōs, which means “light” or “to shine.” It appears also in the ancient Greek word phōsphóros, which means “bearer of light” or “bringer of light.” To photograph means to draw with light. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
In 1982, I was born by the ancient Monongahela River in Talbot Towers, an Allegheny County public housing project in a neighborhood known as “the Bottom” in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Shaped by the steel industry and the legacy of the nineteenth-century industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, it is home to his first steel mill, the Edgar Thomson Steel Works (1875), and his first library, the Braddock Carnegie Library (1889).
From the Steel Valley, along the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio rivers to the Flint River in “Vehicle City,” Flint, Michigan; from historical mineshafts in the Borinage, Belgium, to a historic labor union in Lordstown, Ohio; and from community health workers in Baltimore, Maryland, to a labor leader and civil rights activist in California’s Central Valley, I’ve used my camera as a compass to direct a pathway toward the illuminated truth of the indomitable spirit of working-class families and communities in the twenty-first century.
LaToya Ruby Frazier, John Frazier, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Andrew Carnegie, from The Notion of Family, 2010. © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier. All artwork images courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.
For this reason, it is incumbent upon me to resist—one photograph at a time, one photo-essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time—historical erasure and historical amnesia.
My spiritual bondage to Braddock was broken the instant light exposed my film’s silver halide crystals as I created United States Steel Mon Valley Works Edgar Thomson Plant (2013), hovering over the city with a bird’s-eye view. Permeating the twenty-first-century postindustrial landscape were the vestiges of imperial war, patriarchy, and the death and destruction of nature. Braddock is a namesake of the British general Edward Braddock, who was defeated and mortally wounded at that site in the Battle of the Monongahela in 1755. George Washington, who served as one of Braddock’s aides-de-camp, had earlier witnessed the onset of the imperial war between Great Britain and France—the French and Indian War of 1754–63.4 John Frazier, who aided Washington, served in expeditions against the French. A plaque at the Edgar Thomson Steel Works marks the spot where his cabin once stood.
In the triptych John Frazier, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Andrew Carnegie (2010), which includes a picture my Grandma Ruby took of me, I pose a question: Weighed against the two colossal Scotsmen that dominate Braddock’s history, what is the value of a Black girl’s life?
LaToya Ruby Frazier, Grandma Ruby, Mom, and Me, from The Notion of Family, 2009. © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier.
On the same battlefield, two and a half centuries later, I created a self-portrait, Grandma Ruby, Mom, and Me (2009), standing inside Watt’s Memorial Chapel. It is evident to me that we are fighting not only a physical war but a spiritual one. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me.
Self Portrait October 7 (9:30 a.m.) (2007) documents my battle with lupus. Like photosensitive film and paper, the medications make me light sensitive. I’m one with my medium.
Huxtables, Mom, and Me (2008) is awareness of the American caste system and conflicted social mobility. The first thing an artist finds out . . . before he or she has had enough experience to begin to assess his or her experience . . . is a kind of silence. For reasons he cannot explain to himself or to others, he does not belong anywhere.
LaToya Ruby Frazier, Momme, from The Notion of Family, 2008. © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier.
Momme (2008) is a refusal to remain silent about the abuses I could no longer endure within my matrilineage. You’re bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. When life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back.
The artist is distinguished from all other responsible actors in society—the politicians, legislators, educators, scientists, et cetera—by the fact that he is his own test tube, his own laboratory, working according to very rigorous rules, however unstated these may be, and cannot allow any consideration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all that he can possibly discover concerning the mystery of the human being.
Born Again of Water and Spirit, Ninth Street and Washington Avenue (2009) documents the demarcation line between the Monongahela River, Talbot Towers, and 805 Washington Avenue, the house where Grandma Ruby raised me. Society must accept some things as real; but [the artist] must always know that the visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and all our achievement rests on things unseen. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
LaToya Ruby Frazier, Born Again of Water and Spirit, Ninth Street and Washington Avenue, from The Notion of Family, 2009. © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier
I asked my mentor Kathe Kowalski, “If you’re no longer here, how will I know if I’m making strong work?” Her reply was the last thing she said to me: “You’ll know because your photographs will speak back to you and start to take you places.” For our knowledge is fragmentary (incomplete and imperfect), and our prophecy (our teaching) is fragmentary (incomplete and imperfect).
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Courtesy of: Cultured Magazine
