The New Yorker
October 1, 2018 issue
By Rachel Aviv

LaToya Ruby Frazier produced a new photographic series to visually represent and advocate justice for six-year-old Seth Murrell and his mother Latoya Martin exposing Georgia’s segregated school system and abuse of Black children with disabilities. Please read and learn about Georgia’s Separate and Unequal Special-Education System in the Oct.1st New Yorker issue.

A statewide network of schools for disabled students has trapped black children in neglect and isolation.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (idea) requires that students with disabilities learn in the “least restrictive environment,” a loose term that may mean different things depending on the race or the class of the student. Nirmala Erevelles, a professor of disability studies at the University of Alabama, told me that, “in general, when it comes to people of color—particularly poor people of color—we choose the most restrictive possibility,” sending students to “the most segregated and punitive spaces in the public-school system.” According to Beth Ferri, a disability scholar at Syracuse University, idea provided a kind of loophole to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in schools. Now racial segregation continued “under the guise of ‘disability,’ ” she said. “You don’t need to talk about any race anymore. You can just say that the kid is a slow learner, or defiant, or disrespectful.” Ferri said that idea “treated disability as apolitical—a biological fact. It didn’t think about things like racial or cultural bias.”

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Courtesy of: The New Yorker

LaToya Ruby Frazier. UPMC Life-Changing Medicine, 2012. From the series The Notion of Family.

Art21 Magazine
July 6, 2018
LaToya Ruby Frazier

On January 27, 2018, a public discussion took place at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, in Harlem, on the occasion of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s solo exhibition (on view January 14–February 25), her largest show in New York to date. The exhibition featured three distinct bodies of work: Flint is Family, The Notion of Family, and A Pilgrimage to Noah Purifoy’s Desert Art Museum. After Frazier and her mother each experienced complications with her health, the artist developed relationships within the medical community and began seeing the implications of her work within the medical profession: to serve as a document of unequal access to healthcare. At the gallery, Frazier led a panel discussion with a scholar, a minister, and a doctor on the state of access and equity in healthcare, the history of artists and intellectuals who have fought for these rights in the past, and change-makers who are leading the charge today.

Introductory statements

I believe that photographs are catalysts for change; they inspire hope and transformation. In the late 1940s, at the same time that the Lafargue Clinic was established, Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison were collaborating on the body of work, Harlem is Nowhere. The purpose was to show what racism does to the psychology and the emotional stability of Black people in the United States, in Harlem in particular. Because these images were caught up in a bankruptcy lawsuit, they were never published in their full capacity.

What I find fascinating about this collaboration is what Ellison calls the “pictorial problem.” Ellison says in his notes to Parks, “To present photographic documentation of conditions that intensify mental disturbance, prints must be at once both document and symbol. …[The camera] must represent the negative sociological aspects of Harlem.” He continues, “… we shall try to begin with the maze of psychology, dispossession, and end with the maze, the clinic through which the individual is helped to rediscover himself, … in which he is given the courage to live in a hostile world. The point photographically is to disturb the reader through the same channel that he revives his visual information.” Ellison, who helped found the Lafargue Clinic, here creates a depiction of the psychology in Harlem.

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Courtesy of: Art21 Magazine

W Magazine
Mother’s Day
May 13, 2018
by Stephanie Eckardt and Michael Beckert

“I want my parents to live forever,” the late photographer Larry Sultan, who died in 2009, once said of his storied photographs of his mother and father that made up his ’90s series and effort to “to stop time,” Pictures From Home. Thanks to the continued legacy of his photos, he’s in fact succeeded in doing so. So have, and will, so many other photographers who’ve turned to their parents—and particularly their mothers—as subjects, whether as documentation or simply appreciation, as evidenced here in a Mother’s Day showcase of the moms of everyone from Tina Barney, a similarly film-still-minded photographer, to up-and-comers like Olivia Bee, who, amidst all the pink hair dye and makeout sessions she’s captured as part of her acclaimed series on adolescence, has recognized the importance of teens’ relationships with their parents in that time, too. Indeed, no matter their age, their generation, or their reasoning—from the intimacy of Charlie Engman and Lauren Withrow’s topless portraiture, to Ryan James Caruther’s tribute to memories like how his mom once accidentally left a meatloaf in the oven for seven days—throughout the years, turning their lens toward motherhood has proven to be something they can all agree on.

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Courtesy of: W Magazine