“A marriage of art and activism, the artist’s searing photographs reveal the human toll of economic injustice.” – The New York Times
LaToya Ruby Frazier: Flint Is Family In Three Acts (2022)
Steidl/The Gordon Parks Foundation
Frazier first traveled to Flint in 2016, as part of a magazine commission to create a photo essay about the water crisis. During that trip she met Shea Cobb, a Flint poet, activist and mother who became Frazier’s collaborator in what would evolve into a five-year body of work. Divided into three acts, Flint is Family follows Cobb as she fights for her family’s and community’s health and wellbeing. Read more…
Co-published with The Gordon Parks Foundation
Series edited by Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr.
Edited by Michal Raz-Russo
Contributions by Leigh Raiford
324 pages, 176 images
Hardback / Clothbound 27 x 32 cm, English
ISBN: 978-3-95829-753-1
Available for purchase (EU) from Steidl
Also available (US) through Gladstone Gallery
LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze, 2020
The Renaissance Society, The University Of Chicago Press
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/L/bo68263993.html
Edited by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Karsten Lund, and Solveig Øvstebø.
The Last Cruze, which sets out to amplify the voices of the auto workers in Lordstown, introduces a new chapter to Frazier’s work in investigating labor, family, community, and the working class. Exhibited at the Renaissance Society in 2019, this body of work includes over sixty photographs, alongside the written stories of the workers, and was staged within an installation that echoes the structure of the plant’s assembly line. This substantial catalogue includes extensive documentation of the work and introduces new essays and dialogues by contributors including Coco Fusco, David Harvey, Werner Lange, Lynn Nottage, Julia Reichert, Benjamin Young, and members of the local chapter of the United Auto Workers.
LaToya Ruby Frazier, 2019
Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Mousse Publishing
https://mudamstore.com/products/latoya-ruby-frazier
Edited with text by Christophe Gallois. Text by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Claire Tenu, Elvan Zabunyan.
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s intimate photographs of working-class families in the former steelworking and coalmining hubs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Borinage, Belgium
Frazier’s (born 1982) portraits reflect both a political engagement with and a personal investment in her subject matter. This book presents her seminal series The Notion of a Family, in which she documents three generations of her own family in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, alongside two more recent projects: On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford (2017), made in close collaboration with artist and steelworker Sandra Gould Ford; and Et des terrils un arbre s’élèvera (2016–17), made with the people of Mons in Borinage, Belgium, once home to a coalmine.
Following a long tradition of photography as a tool for political activism, Frazier’s intimate photographs provide insight into the daily lives of those most affected by the industries’ decline.
LaToya Ruby Frazier: And From The Coaltips A Tree Will Rise, 2017
MAC’S Grand Hornu
https://www.artbook.com/9782930368702.html
Text by Denis Gielen, Joanna Leroy, Jean-Marc Prévost.
Photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier (born 1982) grew up in Braddock, PA, a borough in the American Rust Belt ravaged by the steel-industry crisis that hit the US during the Reagan administration. In this former bastion of the steel industry, the artist was raised in her Afro-American family, whose story she told in The Notion of Family. Her 2016 residency at Grand-Hornu allowed her to pursue her work on postindustrial society in Belgium, turning her camera to the Borinage, a mining region whose intense activity in the 19th century was diminished by a series of crises that led to the closure of the last mine in 1976. Testimonies gathered by Frazier from the former miners and their families have resulted in And from the Coaltips A Tree Will Rise, an extensive collection of portraits, landscapes and still lifes.
LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Notion Of Family, 2014
Aperture Foundation
https://www.artbook.com/9781597112482.html
Interview by Dawoud Bey. Text by Laura Wexler, Dennis C. Dickerson.
In this, her first book, LaToya Ruby Frazier (born 1982) offers an incisive exploration of the legacy of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied by Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier’s hometown. The work also considers the impact of that decline on the community and on her family, creating a statement both personal and truly political–an intervention in the histories and narratives of the region that are dominated by stories of Andrew Carnegie and Pittsburgh’s industrial past, but largely ignore those of black families and the working classes. Frazier has set her story of three generations–her Grandma Ruby, her mother and herself–against larger questions of civic belonging and responsibility. The work also documents the demise of Braddock’s only hospital, reinforcing the idea that the history of a place is frequently written on the body as well as the landscape. With The Notion of Family, Frazier knowingly acknowledges and expands upon the traditions of classic black-and-white documentary photography, enlisting the participation of her family, and her mother in particular. As Frazier says, her mother is “co-author, artist, photographer and subject. Our relationship primarily exists through a process of making images together. I see beauty in all her imperfections and abuse.” Frazier’s work reinforces the idea of image-making as a transformative act, a means of resetting traditional power dynamics and narratives, both those of her family and those of the community at large. Frazier is a 2014 Guggenheim fellow.
