HUCK Magazine
November 10th, 2017
by Cian Traynor

LaToya Ruby Frazier on Gordon Parks’ inspiring legacy
Groundbreaking gravitas
As one of the most prominent voices to document American life in the 1950s and ’60s, Gordon Parks used his camera as a ‘weapon’ to fight racism, intolerance and poverty – paving the way for others to blur the line between artist and activist. LaToya Ruby Frazier is determined to further that legacy through social documentary that’s both personal and political.

I first encountered Gordon Parks’ work when I saw his American Gothic portrait of Ella Watson from 1942. That was the moment I realized photography is more than just taking pictures.

I learned that, through one dignified image, you could speak about your position as a black woman and how the value of your labour is viewed in society; you could show what inequality does to humanity while also capturing the strength shown in the face of it.

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Courtesy of: HUCK Magazine

Pittsburgh City Paper
November 8, 2017
by Lissa Brennan

The nationally known, Braddock-born photographer brings an emotionally charged show home

As residents of this city, we might regard the work of LaToya Ruby Frazier as local. Hailing from Braddock, Frazier utilizes her neighborhood as not only a setting but as a presence, a primary character in the vivid, sometimes stark, always eloquent narratives she documents in precise black and white. But the reality is that the nationally known Frazier — who now splits time between Pittsburgh, New York and Chicago — is one of the most thrilling, emotionally charged photographers not just in Pittsburgh, but in America.

In her 2001-14 series The Notion of Family, excerpts of which are now at the Silver Eye Center for Photography, she turned the lens on her grandmother, mother and self. There are appearances by a grandfather, and her mother’s boyfriend, Mister Art. But the women take focus, sometimes literally. In one portrait, Mister Art in front fills the frame, but the clarity is given to the woman behind him.

These works tell a story of love, struggle and connection, with honesty, without mawkishness, and emphasize the persistence of humanity in a world often inhumane. In one piece, a young Frazier coyly directs at the camera a Mona Lisa smile; she’s a loose-limbed, coltish adolescent sitting on a pristine carpet with a grandmother who a bit warily eyes the lens. The television behind them is set to A&E, the room adorned with dolls and statues, and it’s a lovely intimate glimpse into warm domesticity. On the gallery wall opposite is a different portrait — Frazier and her mother, with Grandma Ruby in a coffin. While her mother’s gaze hits the ground, Frazier’s look here is guarded, flat and ready; while she is standing straight, she hums with the intensity of grief. In other images, we see the change in her grandmother’s surroundings, the littered carpet and a once cozy room now bare, Frazier shouldering full garbage bags within.

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Courtesy of: Pittsburgh City Paper

The New Yorker
October 31, 2017
by Doreen St. Félix

The photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier can capture the decline of an entire economy, the vulnerable cycles of American industry, within a single human face. Like the documentarians Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks before her, she scales down social upheaval to the intimate, modest scale of portraiture. It is the long shadow of the Rust Belt steel boom that especially compels her; she is a black child of Braddock, a “financially distressed municipality” of Pittsburgh, according to the Pennsylvania government, where Andrew Carnegie and the barons of metal had once established monopolies on that dangerous, alchemical work.

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Courtesy of: The New Yorker