Engaging the theme of Currency from various perspectives, the 8th Triennial of Photography Hamburg opens on May 20, 2022 with twelve exhibitions presenting over 75 artists.
From appraised colonial-era photo albums to poetic reveries, social documentary and conceptual approaches to photography, the exhibitions explore the myriad ways in which photographs are produced, circulated, and interpreted.
The Kunstverein in Hamburg will host a solo exhibition of the artist and photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier, namely, Flint is Family, Act III, the last part of her photo series in which Frazier documented the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Extending critical work around resources, Kunsthaus Hamburg presents Seeing the Wood for the Trees by the Italian design duo Formafantasma – a series of visual essays from their extensive project Cambio that investigates the development and regulation of the global timber industry.
LaToya Ruby Frazier is a visual artist known for collaborative storytelling with the people who appear in her photographs, videos, texts, and performances. Her use of the photograph as a platform for social justice and visual representation for working-class families is rooted in her commitment to expose the violation of basic human rights and promote environmental justice, access to healthcare, education, employment, and migration and immigration equity. Her photographs often become a source of empowerment that leads to creative solutions.
Frazier’s Prize culminated in the publication of Flint Is Family In Three Acts, which chronicles the ongoing man-made water crisis in Flint, Michigan from the perspective of those who live and fight for their right to access free, clean water. Featuring Frazier’s photographs, texts and poetry by Shea S. Cobb, Amber N. Hasan, Douglas R. Smiley, and Flint community members, as well as scholarly essays by Frazier, Leigh Raiford, and Michal Raz-Russo, this five-year body of work, begun in 2016, serves as an intervention and alternative to mass-media accounts of this political, economic, and racial injustice.
In 2014, as a cost-cutting measure, the Flint City Council switched the town’s water supply from a Detroit treatment facility to the industrial waste-filled Flint River. Forced to consume and bathe in water contaminated with lead at 27 times the government’s maximum threshold, Flint’s citizens—predominantly Black and overwhelmingly poor—fell ill almost immediately and many battle chronic medical conditions as a result.
Frazier first traveled to Flint in 2016, as part of a magazine commission to do 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. Divided into three acts, Flint Is Family follows Cobb as she fights for her family’s and community’s health and wellbeing. Act I introduces Cobb, her family, and The Sister Tour, a collective of women artists. Cobb lives with her mother and her daughter, Zion. She works as a school bus driver and hairstylist, while launching her career as a poet, singer, and songwriter. To protect her daughter’s health, Cobb makes the critical decision to leave her mother and friends behind and make the reverse migration to Mississippi, where her father resides on family owned land. Act II follows Cobb and Zion to Newton, Mississippi, where they move in with Cobb’s father, Mr. Douglas R. Smiley. There, they learn how to take care of his horses, as well as the land and fresh water springs they will one day inherit. Due to segregation and discrimination in the Newton County school system, Cobb and Zion eventually return to Flint. Act III documents the arrival of a 26,000-pound atmospheric water generator to Flint in 2019 that Frazier, Cobb, and her best friend, Amber Hasan—a hip-hop artist, herbalist, and community organizer—helped set up and operate in their neighborhood.
Spurred by the lack of mass-media interest in the impact of this ongoing crisis, and inspired by the collaborative work of photographer Gordon Parks and writer Ralph Ellison in 1940s Harlem, Frazier’s collaborative approach ensures that the lives and voices of Flint’s residents are seen and heard, and that their collective creative endeavors provide a solution to this man-made water crisis. Flint is Family In Three Acts is a 21st century survey of the American landscape that reveals the persistent segregation and racism that haunts it. In equal measure, it is also a story of a community’s strength, pride, and resilience in the face of a crisis that is still ongoing.
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LaToya Ruby Frazier’s The Last Cruze chosen by TIME as one of the best photo books of 2021
The Last Cruze by LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago
The Last Cruze by LaToya Ruby Frazier is an extensive, collaborative body of work that focuses on General Motors autoworkers in Lordstown, Ohio, who are members of the United Auto Workers labor union. After the plant abruptly ceased production in 2019, thousands of workers had to decide whether to transfer to another plant or risk losing their jobs and benefits. Frazier sensitively documents the autoworkers and their families’ stories during this difficult time. Through black-and-white portraits of the union members in their homes alongside personal testimonies, Frazier explores themes of resilience, solidarity and shared purpose, as well as the importance of advocating for workers.
Women’s Committee final gathering inside their conference room at UAW Local 1112 Reutehr Scandy Alli union hall (left to right, Crystal Carpenter, Linda Hash, Trisha Brown, RaNeal Edwards, Pamela Brown, Marilyn Moore, Mary Ola Stemple, Tunisha Bell, and Frances Turnage), Lordstown, OH, 2019 LaToya Ruby Frazier—The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago
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LaToya Ruby Frazier, Devin Allen and Jamel Shabazz are the Subject of the New Documentary, ‘A Choice Of Weapons: Inspired By Gordon Parks,’ Debuting On HBO.
By the time Gordon Parks shot his first photograph for Life Magazine, his mother had died, racism had forced him out of his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas, and he’d worked in brothels, as a singer, and as a professional basketball player. He was not yet 30 when he captured the infamous image titled “American Gothic” and the follow-up sequence of photos of Ella Watson. Watson worked as a cleaner in the Farm Security Administration building where Parks had a fellowship. HBO’s documentary, A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks, doesn’t simply examine the photographer’s extensive body of work. It also explores his activism and what it meant to preserve the 20th-century Black experience through his camera lens.
In all of his varied versions of life, Parks strived to be seen, and he learned quickly through his photographs how important it was for the world to see Black people as they truly lived and existed, instead of solely through a white gaze. By documenting the lives of Malcolm X, Black rural Southerners, and even a gang leader in Harlem, Parks would become a leader, inspiring a new generation of photographers who have used their cameras to active their voices. […]
Frazier’s journey behind the camera came only after immersing herself with her subjects. “I was making portraits of families living in homeless shelters in Erie, Pennsylvania for my beginning photography course at Edinboro University,” she explained. “At first, I did not take my camera to the shelter but instead spent time with each family to the point people thought I resided in the shelter too. One evening, there was a lovely Black woman whose omnipresent energy had drawn me in close to her. When I returned the next week to give her prints of her portrait, that’s when she told me that the image reminded her of a man she once saw on PBS named Gordon Parks and then [she] asked me if I ever heard of him, to which I replied, ‘No,’ and she said, ‘Well you should.’”
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Los Angeles Times Entertainment & Arts By Deborah Vankin
Gordon Parks’ self-portrait, taken in 1948. The photographer, and the artists he inspired, are the subjects of a new HBO documentary. (From the Gordon Parks Foundation and HBO)
“A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks” debuts on HBO Monday night, a date that commemorates the photographer’s late November birthday. The film is less a chronological telling of Parks’ life story (the 2000 HBO documentary “Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Parks” details that) and instead focuses on his legacy — specifically on the generation of photographers, activists and artists that he inspired. Singer-songwriter Alicia Keys and rapper-producer Swizz Beatz are executive producers and luminaries including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bryan Stevenson, Ava DuVernay and Spike Lee are among those who make appearances in the film, speaking to how Parks — who was also a film director, composer, author and activist — shaped their bodies of work and the world.
“At a time and in a society where Black people were told far too often that we’re criminals, that we’re ugly, that we’re less worthy to have the spotlight on us for any reason,” DuVernay says in the film, “Gordon put a lens and a light on us for ourselves and allowed us to see the elegance of the lives that we live and the places where we are.” […]
Three contemporary photographers provide the connective tissue for the film’s structure: Baltimore-based Devin Allen, LaToya Ruby Frazier of Chicago, and New York City’s Jamel Shabazz. Their personal stories and insights about Parks add another layer of intimacy and immediacy that courses through the documentary’s narrative.
[…]
Frazier, 39, always knew she would be an artist while growing up in the Pennsylvania steel mill town of Braddock. She studied photography at Edinboro University, but learned about Parks from a homeless woman she was making portraits of at a nearby shelter at the time.
“I came back with the portrait that we made together and when I handed it to her, she said: ‘this reminds me of a man I once saw on PBS, Gordon Parks,’” Frazier says, adding that she raced to a Barnes & Noble afterward and bought a book about Parks.
The next semester she learned more about Parks in a photography class, which touched on his aforementioned “American Gothic” portrait, one of his most famous images. Watson, the woman in the image, was a so-called “charwoman” or janitor at the time. The photograph was taken at the Farm Security Administration offices in Washington, D.C.
“That photograph by Gordon taught me how to speak through a photograph and make social commentary about the United States,” Frazier says. “This image asks the viewer a question, which is: ‘what is the value of a Black woman’s life in America?’”
Frazier now focuses her lens on working-class communities, healthcare inequality and environmental justice issues. She spent five months living in Flint, Mich., photo-documenting how the city’s water crisis affected residents. Last year, she photographed Breonna Taylor’s family for “Vanity Fair.” It’s work she feels would make Parks proud.
“I think that the images that I made speak to his spirt and his influence,” she says.
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Black Girl Nerds Movie Reviews By Cassondra Feltus
HBO’s ‘A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks’ Is a Visual History of the Photographer’s Art and Activism
This new documentary delves into the life and work of photographer, filmmaker, writer, composer, and activist Gordon Parks. Directed by John Maggio (Mr. Saturday Night), the documentary chronicles the fascinating story of a self-taught photographer from Kansas and his rise to a multi-hyphenate pop-culture icon. The film explores the psychology behind photography, the power of an image, and the importance of uplifting others through art.
The documentary features interviews with artists, activists, friends, and family, including Jelani Cobb, Ava DuVernay (Selma), Nelson George, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Spike Lee (BlacKkKlansman), Anderson Cooper, Khalil Muhammad, Bryan Stevenson, Richard Roundtree (Shaft), Michal Raz-Russo, and Darren Walker. It’s produced by Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean, Alicia Keys, Gordon Parks Foundation director Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., and HBO Documentary Films.
A Choice of Weapons looks at Gordon Parks’ cultural impact through the lens of three contemporary photographers — Devin Allen, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Jamel Shabazz. Each has made a name for themselves with powerful photos. Allen’s photo from the Freddie Gray protests, “Baltimore Uprising,” landed on the cover of Time Magazine in 2015. For five years, Frazier covered the Flint, Michigan, water crisis in her series, “Flint Is Family,” for Elle. Most recently, she photographed Breonna Taylor’s family for Vanity Fair. Shabazz has documented hip-hop culture on the streets of New York since the 1980s.
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