LaToya Ruby Frazier (2019)

“In my photographs, I make social commentary about urgent issues I see in the communities or places I’m in. I use them as a platform to advocate for social justice and as a means to create visibility for people who are on the margins, who are deemed “unworthy”: the poor, the elderly, anyone who is other, anyone who doesn’t have a voice. I create depictions of their humanity that call for equity. That is what is dear to my practice and my position as an artist.”
— LaToya Ruby Frazier

Since the early 2000s LaToya Ruby Frazier has developed a documentary practice that is both personal and engaged with the social, political, and economic realities of the United States. For her exhibition at Mudam, Frazier presents the emblematic photographic series The Notion of Family, developed between 2001 and 2014 around three generations of women – her grandmother, mother and herself – witnessing the decline of her hometown of Braddock, the former steel capital of the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that would subsequently become a ghost town, with two more recent bodies of work that continue her focus on the working classes and the interaction between personal life and sociopolitical issues. On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford (2017) is the outcome of a close collaboration with Sandra Gould Ford, a photographer and writer who was employed in the steel industry of Pittsburgh and who documented life in factories that were closing down; Et des terrils un arbre s’élèvera (2016-2017), is the result of an ambitious project near Mons, in Borinage Belgium, created in collaboration with former miners and their families. This publication, published on the occasion of her show, features works from the three series; a conversazione between the artist, Christophe Gallois, and Claire Tenu; and an essay by Elvan Zabunyan.

LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER
2019
English, French
Mousse Publishing
176 pages
Softcover, 23 × 33 cm
ISBN: 9788867493623
€ 30 / $ 35

Edited by Christophe Gallois
Texts by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Christophe Gallois, Claire Tenu, Elvan Zabunyan

Courtesy of: Mousse Publishing

THE GREAT FIRE

Vanity Fair Special Issue

A BEAUTIFUL LIFE by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Photographs by LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier on the photographs she took of the family of Breonna Taylor for the cover story of Vanity Fair’s September issue, guest-edited by Ta-Nehisi Coates, with words by Tamika Palmer, the mother of Breonna Taylor.

“I can’t stop thinking about Breonna Taylor, her murder and unjust criminalization made me so upset that I risked my life and broke quarantine, knowing I am highly susceptible to COVID-19 due to having Lupus, an autoimmune disorder. This is how much it meant to me to reclaim a visual justice and humane dignified representations of Breonna and her family members. My mother was a nurse, my niece is an aspiring nurse, Breonna Taylor wanted to be a nurse, not a piece of legislation or another slain statistic at the hands of law enforcement in America. Since Breonna worked as an EMT this would mean that the LMPD are her colleagues. To be brutally murdered at home, in the middle of the night, by the very people you work with within your community is the most offensive and heinous crime against humanity. If you look up the very definition of the characteristics and attributes of an EMT worker or a nurse, it provides the proof and evidence of Breonna’s character. My portraits are a call for justice and the unwavering steadfast endurance of Black women in America regardless of the persecution we face on a daily basis. Breonna Taylor is a hero, a frontline essential worker, and I demand justice now. Lastly, the way the LMPD portrayed her loving boyfriend and fiancé Kenneth Walker was inexcusable. These portraits serve to restore Kenneth’s humanity and to honor his love for Breonna, as he was about to propose to her. It is abundantly clear that as time goes on and more details are revealed and there are still no arrests of the police officers and detective that murdered Breonna, that in America Black people have no constitutional rights, and therefore all lives can’t matter until Black Lives Matter!”

– LaToya Ruby Frazier

View Special Issue on VanityFair.com

Courtesy of: Vanity Fair

The End of the Line: What Happens to a Factory Town When the Factory Shuts Down?

The New York Times
Photo Essay and Interviews by Latoya Ruby Frazier

,Frazier’s photo-essay and interviews, featured in the recent Money issue of The New York Times Magazine, is an incisive collaboration with a labor union, United Auto Workers Local 1112 in Lordstown, Ohio.

Courtesy of: The New York Times