LaToya Ruby Frazier (b. Braddock, Pennsylvania, 1982)
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s artistic practice ranges across photography, video, installation, books, and performance. She is a collaborative storyteller whose work, at its core, focuses on class and the American lived experience. To relay an authentic story, Frazier lives, works, and creates alongside the people whose lives she is documenting. This echoes the ethos of 1930s social documentary photography, in which seemingly straightforward images of American lives became tools to ignite social change. In Diaries of Home, two of Frazier’s seminal series are represented: The Notion of Family, 2001‒14, and Flint is Family (Act I and Act III), 2016‒21. Both series embody the integrity, empathy, conviction, and advocacy of Frazier’s practice.
Frazier has described her imagery as a type of devotion to making pictures about the world she came from and lives in. In her first large-scale series, The Notion of Family, she turned her camera onto herself and her next of kin, documenting the details of their lives in her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a poor steel town outside of Pittsburgh. Focusing on three generations—her grandmother Ruby, her mother, and herself—Frazier’s photographic candor conveys intimate details of their lives while affording opportunities to witness universal truths. Filled with still lifes, portraits, and landscapes, The Notion of Family contrasts the drudgery and banality of life in Braddock with the familial connections that make up Frazier’s home.
In 2016, Frazier traveled to Flint, Michigan, commissioned by Elle magazine to create a photo essay on the city’s government-inflicted water crisis. Over the next five years, she revisited the city numerous times, documenting the hardships facing Flint residents. Like The Notion of Family, Flint is Family (Act I), 2016–17, focuses on three generations of women (Frazier’s collaborator Shea S. Cobb, Cobb’s mother, Ms. Reneé, and her daughter, Zion) and how the city’s circumstances impact the family and their community’s physical, emotional, and mental well-being. The rich black-and-white images portray a nuanced story of collective righteous frustration, longing, hope, resiliency, and joy, demonstrating that simply living can become an act of resistance.
Years of Frazier’s collaborative humanitarian and photographic work helped bring life-giving technology to Flint’s communities. Flint is Family (Act III), 2019, documents the arrival of a 26,000-pound atmospheric water generator. For the first time since 2014, Flint residents were able to collect safe, uncontaminated drinking water. Frazier’s large-scale color prints document a sense of relief upon her subjects’ faces. While optimistic, the looming presence of the generator reminds viewers that this community will be forever scarred by government corruption and injustice.
La Toya Ruby Frazier, Zion Doing Her Math Homework from the International Academy of Flint (Est. 1999), Flint, Michigan, 2016–17. Gelatin silver print. 20 × 24 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Gladstone Gallery. © LaToya Ruby Frazier