The photographer as witness is a familiar conceit, one that evokes the artist’s responsibility to observe the lives of others. It’s a role that has been reinforced by traditions of photojournalism, documentary photography, and anthropology, while taking on new forms and renewed urgency in recent years. Drawn largely from the MCA’s collection, the photographs in Witness at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) put pressure on familiar understandings of the photographer’s role as self-appointed observer. These works record, reflect on, or stage different kinds of encounters between photographer and subject. In doing so, the artists lead us to think about the various people who play a part in a given photograph—including the viewer—and how they contribute to, or sometimes confound, what it seems to convey.

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Jul 2, 2016–Feb 12, 2017
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
220 E Chicago Ave
Chicago, IL 60611

 

THE ARTISTS FEATURED IN WITNESS INCLUDE:

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
Christian Boltanski (French, b. 1944)
Sophie Calle (French, b. 1953)
Larry Clark (American, b. 1943)
Anne Collier (American, b. 1970)
Rineke Dijkstra (Dutch, b. 1959)
Walker Evans (American, 1903–1976)
Hal Fischer (American, b. 1950)
David Hockney (British, b. 1937)
LaToya Ruby Frazier (American, b. 1982)
Alfredo Jaar (Chilean, b. 1956)
Jason Lazarus (American, b. 1975)
Sharon Lockhart (American, b. 1964)
Kerry James Marshall (American, b. 1955)
Michael Rovner (Israeli, b. 1957)
Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Collier Schorr (American, b. 1963)
Andres Serrano (American, b. 1950)
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)

Courtesy of: MCA Chicago

LaToya Ruby Frazier, a 2015 MacArthur Fellow, documents three generations of Blackness in a decaying steel mill town

By LaToya Cross

“This is not an art project.”
But rather the collection of over 100 photographs is the life of photographer and Art Institute of Chicago instructor, LaToya Ruby Frazier.

Inspired by Gordon Parks’ ideology of using the camera as a “weapon” to fight against racism, poverty and social wrongs, Frazier has spent the last 12 years focusing her lens on the collapse of the once booming steel mill industry in her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Titled, Notion of Family, the visual documentation also addresses and counters the “historic erasure, silence and media portrayal that trivialized and undermined Black life,” Frazier explains.

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Courtesy of Ebony

LaToya Ruby Frazier is the only photographer among the 24 winners of the prestigious 2015 MacArthur Fellow Program by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

“I’m overjoyed to receive this award because often, when you’re a young black woman talking about inequality, people don’t take you seriously,” [Frazier] says. “It’s validation to my work being a testimony and a fight for social justice and cultural change.”

Informed by documentary practices from the turn of the last century, Frazier explores identities of place, race, and family in work that is a hybrid of self-portraiture and social narrative. The crumbling landscape of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once-thriving steel town, forms the backdrop of her images, which make manifest both the environmental and infrastructural decay caused by postindustrial decline and the lives of those who continue—largely by necessity—to live amongst it.

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Courtesy of Rachel Lowry @rachelllowry of TIME’s LightBox and MacFound.org