Photography by Sean Eaton. Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art.
LaToya Ruby Frazier is an eloquent storyteller, making visible the landscapes and lives of working people. With honesty and empathy, her photographs—soon to be displayed in a solo show at New York City’s MOMA—force us to confront how disenfranchisement, corporate greed, and government neglect have impacted the lives of people from the auto factories in the Rust Belt to the toxic waterways of Flint, Mich. She is an archivist, a healer, and an artist. Her work captures the anxiety, the beauty, and the reality of people negotiating the complexities of life on the brink. The resulting photo essays are informed by collaboration with their participants, creating searing portraits that reflect care and intimacy. LaToya’s images pierce our complacency and demand that we pay attention to the world around us with intention and compassion.
Lynn Nottage is a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright
Nottage is a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright
https://latoyarubyfrazier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/LRF_logo_2016.png00Webmasterhttps://latoyarubyfrazier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/LRF_logo_2016.pngWebmaster2024-04-18 12:00:092024-04-18 12:29:39LaToya named in TIME’s list of 100 Most Influential People of 2024
From Braddock, Pennsylvania, photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier uses her lens to capture the true essence of the Black experience in America. Her work tells the story of struggle but also that of resilience and strength as she exposes the cracks in the American water sanitation and health care system that marginalized populations fall through all too often.
Her photo essays Flint is Family, The Notion of Family, Campaign for Braddock Hospital and The Grey Area touch on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for Clean Water and Sanitation and Industries, Innovation, and Infrastructure. Undoubtedly, consistently depriving specific groups of access to healthcare, water, and fundamental human necessities can unquestionably be considered as a form of violence. By advocating for equitable and accessible healthcare for the Black community, Frazier’s work also aligns with the United Nations Sustainable Development goal of Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions.
From Flint is Family, 2016. Image courtesy of Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane.
In her 2019 Ted Talk Frazier describes the story behind Flint is Family while dissecting environmental racism and healthcare inequity. Recounting her experience visiting a public school in the area she says, “It rocked me to the core to see that in America, we can go from fountains that say ‘Whites’ or ‘Blacks only,’ to today seeing fountains that say, “Contaminated water. Do not drink.” And somehow, that’s acceptable?”
The history of environmentalism in the United States has been deeply embedded with racism since its beginnings. The all too predictable patterns of history come to light once again when looking at the Flint water crisis of 2014. It is a repeated failure of institutions to implement the necessary infrastructure to support marginalized groups thereby pushing these people deeper to the margins of society. The social, political, and historical cannot be separated from the empirical evidence.
The mishandling of the Flint water crisis despite outbreaks of disease, lead poisoning and numerous complaints by the community’s citizens demanding the city’s attention, should come as no surprise at all. Against this backdrop, and drawing parallels to her experience growing up in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier’s work – particularly Flint is Family, Campaign for Braddock Hospital, and The Grey Area – confronts environmental racism and healthcare inequity in the United States.
[…]
From The Notion of Family, 2001-2014. Image courtesy of The New York Times.
Another photo essay, photographed between 2001 and 2014, The Notion of Family looks at the Black experience in the face of the American healthcare system. In this project, Frazier shares her personal experience growing up in Braddock, Pennsylvania and her experience as a victim of the unjust healthcare system. Battling cancer, as did her mother and grandmother, Frazier was exposed to a healthcare system deeply embedded with racism.
A Ted Talk by Dorothy Roberts describes the problem of race-based medicine where race in biomedicine is used as a proxy for underlying features that are present in certain social categories of people, but are not themselves racial. As in, socioeconomic factors such as healthcare inequity, water crisis, etc., that shape the health of marginalized groups are ignored and reframed as matters of race, something biologically constituted to these groups.
As a result, victims of an unjust system are conveniently blamed for their inadequate health while the institutions entrenched in discriminatory values perpetrating injustice reign freely. Frazier’s work urges institutions to take accountability for their histories of injustice towards marginalized populations and take initiative to, “promote and enforce non-discriminatory laws and policies for sustainable development.”
https://latoyarubyfrazier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/LRF_logo_2016.png00Webmasterhttps://latoyarubyfrazier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/LRF_logo_2016.pngWebmaster2023-08-25 21:26:492023-09-20 21:37:49LaToya Ruby Frazier Raises Her Lens Against Environmental Racism and Healthcare Inequity in America
The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) has acquired LaToya Roby Frazier’s arresting installation More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022 (2022). The piece consists of 66 inkjet prints featuring portraits and didactics mounted on 18 socially distanced, steel intravenous drip poles, a solemn reflection of and monument to the role of community healthcare workers (CHWs)—many of them women of colour—at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The work has been gifted to the BMA by the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland. More Than Conquerors presents an alternative methodology to commemoration, centering marginalised voices and communities disproportionately affected by America’s for-profit healthcare system. Originally developed for the 58th Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh, More Than Conquerors won the coveted Carnegie Prize before arriving at Gladstone Gallery in New York this spring. The installation will begin its tenure at the BMA in 2025, where it will kick off a year-long environmental awareness initiative.
“More Than Conquerors reflects the distinct quality of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s artistry and her innate ability to encapsulate stories of profound personal and communal meaning,” Asma Naeem, the BMA’s director, said in a statement. “The installation offers a poignant tribute to some of the most important but under-acknowledged heroes of our community.”
Frazier’s work on More Than Conquerors grew from her relationship with Lisa Cooper, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity. Frazier was inspired to develop a project addressing healthcare inequity after experiencing discrimination while attempting to get vaccinated for Covid-19. She was moved to focus on the lives and histories of the chronically undersung CHWs, who help underserved populations navigate with the infamously byzantine healthcare systems of the United States.
https://latoyarubyfrazier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/LRF_logo_2016.png00Webmasterhttps://latoyarubyfrazier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/LRF_logo_2016.pngWebmaster2023-06-30 21:41:002023-09-20 21:50:21Baltimore Museum of Art acquires LaToya Ruby Frazier installation honouring community healthcare workers
Kinship, a new book from the National Portrait Gallery, authored by Dorothy Moss and Leslie Ureña (with Robyn Asleson, Taína Caragol, and Charlotte Ickes), asks a critical question: What is kinship in the United States today, and how is it evolving? The book explores this through a series of works by eight contemporary artists and accompanies a show of the same name at the museum, also curated by Moss, Ureña, Asleson, Caragol, and Ickes. In addition to the art, the book includes a series of essays and a discussion with the artists. Work on the project began in 2018, and its timing heightened its relevance.
Indeed, Kinship shows that a number of the artists had to navigate COVID-19’s influence on their process. Thomas Holton, whose photo series The Lams of Ludlow Street portrays a single family in New York’s Chinatown over the course of nearly a decade, found himself separated from them for more than two months under lockdown — the longest he’d been away from them since starting the project. Jess T. Dugan, whose Family Pictures series spans a decade-plus and focuses on three generations of their family, shifted to self-portraiture and still lifes during the pandemic. Their photos of family in 2020 capture the intimacy of life under lockdown through a sense of stillness on the bed.
“The thing that was so weird was that [the pandemic] caused you to think more deeply about family, etcetera, on the one hand,” artist Sedrick Huckaby pointed out in an interview in the book. “And then, on the other hand, it disconnected you from people.” Huckaby’s “Connection” captures this tension: a papier-mâché sculpture of his daughter, Halle Lujah Huckaby, looking at her phone sits in front of an oil on canvas painting depicting her grandmother and great-grandmother in ghostly silhouette.
Throughout, the book communicates a sense of kinship as meaning more than blood, but the subjects in focus are largely blood relations. The word “kin” indeed comes from a Proto-Indo-European word meaning “to give birth to,” and the artists grapple with the tensions therein, where perhaps the expectations of genetic kinship heighten family tensions and dysfunction over the course of decades. Jessica Todd Harper’s two-decade series of photos of her family lit like Vermeer paintings captures the fleeting beauty of life and the growth and loss that happen over decades.
June 3, 2023 5:00 PM – 8:30 PM G.W. Van Slyke & Horton Building 25 Dederick Street Kingston, NY
The 2023 Vision Awards will honor four people who have significantly impacted photography and CPW itself. The June 3 celebration will be the first public event at CPW’s future headquarters, the historic G.W. Van Slyke & Horton cigar factory at 25 Dederick Street, Kingston. Long a mainstay of CPW’s programming, reinstating this beloved tradition is a crucial part of CPW’s relaunch in Kingston.
Howard Greenberg In 1977, Howard Greenberg co-founded the Catskill Center for Photography in Woodstock (later the Center for Photography at Woodstock), one of the earliest regional spaces for photographers to meet and for photography exhibitions. He later went on to establish the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City in 1981, and for over forty years that gallery has been a leader in presenting photojournalism and other forms of fine art photography.
LaToya Ruby Frazier LaToya Ruby Frazier is a prominent documentary photographer and activist. At the age of sixteen, she began photographing her family and neighborhood in Braddock Pennsylvania. Her breakout monograph, The Notion of Family (2013), focused on the damaging health effects her family experienced during Braddock’s deindustrialization. Frazier was a Woodstock Artist-in-Residence in 2008 and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2015.
Tommy Kha Tommy Kha is a contemporary photographer, who works in his hometown, Memphis, TN, and Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from Yale University, and was a Woodstock Artist-in-Residence in 2011. Kha was the recipient of a NYFA Photography Fellowship in 2022, and the 2021 Next Step Award, which featured a one-person show at Baxter St at the Camera Club of NY. His monograph Half, Full, Quarter was published by Aperture in 2023.
Wendy Red Star Wendy Red Star is a visual artist, working primarily in photography, mixed media, sculpture, textiles, and performance. Raised on the Crow reservation in Montana, her work draws deeply on her cultural and personal heritage and ideas surrounding personal and collective identity. Her first comprehensive monograph, Wendy Red Star: Delegation (2022), is an engaging exploration of historical narratives from a feminist, Indigenous perspective.
View of “LaToya Ruby Frazier: More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022” at Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2023. Image courtesy of Gladstone Gallery.
That photography has become one of the most banal visual interfaces in twenty-first-century life is no new observation. Every day, millions of people upload scores of images to privatized servers; encounter even more images on algorithmically governed online platforms; and craft their lives in accordance with the cohesive textures of branded imagery. With this, one might ask whether photography’s critical force and relevance has waned in our image-saturated present or, conversely, if its pertinence has been heightened by the unique burden it bears in reflecting on its ethical, political, and aesthetic relation to the accumulating heap of images. Three recent photography-led exhibitions in New York City forged unexpectedly generative dialogues, laying bare photography’s embodied contradictions. These exhibitions, by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Tina Barney, and Buck Ellison, suggest that the medium’s dissonant valences symptomize the wider social contradictions of racial capital and its attendant global crises.1
Installed at Gladstone Gallery is LaToya Ruby Frazier’s More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland (2021–22)—after its first showing at the 58th Carnegie International, for which it won the Carnegie Prize. Eighteen metal IV poles are arranged into a minimal grid, their fluid-filled bags notably absent, evoking the spectral gravity of millions of corpses produced at the height of the pandemic. The poles, distanced from one another in accordance with social distancing protocols, gain an uncanny anthropomorphized presence with each pole bearing four frames, two viewable from each side.
La Kerry Dawson With Her Daughter Angel Crowder And Her Personal Supports Specialist Jocelyn M. Jones At Home, Baltimore, Maryland 2021. Part of LaToya Ruby Frazier, More Than Conquerors: A Monument For Community Health Workers Of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022, 2022. Eighteen stainless steel IV poles, sixty-six archival inkjet prints, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York.
Appearing on the front side are diptych portraits of eighteen community healthcare workers (CHWs). These workers function as a critical bridge between the healthcare system and under-resourced communities in the United States. They form, in other words, civil infrastructures that mediate the systemically produced health disparities resulting from class warfare, anti-immigration sentiment, and the afterlives of transatlantic slavery. Here, Frazier pairs realist photographic portraits of each of the workers (predominantly Black women, some of whom pose with their families, and in locations of their choosing), with edited transcriptions of interviews the artist conducted with the workers. The text panels take a while to get through—on average, about 15–20 minutes, the duration of a doctor’s appointment.2 Through this durational strategy, which at best encourages multiple return visits and an ethically attuned witnessing to the self-narrated accounts of the healthcare industry’s “foot soldiers,” but at worst risks inducing frustration, shallow intrigue or dismissal, Frazier counters the racialized logics of spectacle that structure the frenzied consumption of Black subjects on various media platforms.
On the reverse, Frazier further decenters her authorship by incorporating photographs taken by anonymous CHWs, which are then paired with shorter textual transcriptions, many bilingual—in Spanish and English. These images, which largely capture the “organized abandonment” of Baltimore’s predominantly Black-inhabited urban topography, were developed during workshops led by Frazier, in collaboration with Dr. Chidinma Ibe, an assistant professor at the John Hopkins School of Medicine (and one of the subjects in the installation who offers insights not only on the racialized, class-based health disparities within the States but also between the Global North and the Global South).3 Building off the longstanding notion of “photovoice”, brought to Frazier’s attention by Dr. Lisa Cooper, another collaborator/subject, these photographs (and Frazier’s installation as a whole) wield the medium’s evidentiary capacities to make visually palpable counter-claims in an anti-Black public sphere—in the concrete realm of policy-making.4
Tiffany Scott Standing In Federal Hill Park, Baltimore, Maryland 2021. Part of LaToya Ruby Frazier, More Than Conquerors: A Monument For Community Health Workers Of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022, 2022. Eighteen stainless steel IV poles, sixty-six archival inkjet prints, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York.
Some might find the politics of visibility and recognition on which these counter-claims depend problematic. Yet we ought not dismiss Frazier’s reanimation of social and conceptual documentary traditions towards these (albeit constrained) juridical ends. 5 6 At present, CHWs are paid through grants provided to healthcare institutions, and as a result, remain ineligible to receive proper compensation along with other salaried benefits, some of which might include, ironically, health insurance. To add to the structural absurdity, these are the same workers who risked their lives to administer vaccines to vulnerable populations at the beginning of the pandemic. Frazier’s (counter-)monument therefore does not operate merely on the register of representation, for its socially embedded, collectivized conditions of production as well as its broadened circuits of distribution exceed the field of art, and in so doing elaborates a mode of artistic practice that is not only about but equally of and for these ongoing labor struggles.
[…]
Other photography-focused exhibitions, besides the ones discussed here, include Clifford Prince King at Gordon Robichaux, Susan Hiller at Lisson Gallery, Uta Barth at Tanya Bonakdar, and “Photography Then” at Anonymous.
This phrase is taken from Black abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Gilmore elaborates the interrelations between race-making, spatial politics, and health disparities in Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (London and New York: Verso Books, 2022).
Press release for “LaToya Ruby Frazier: More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Healthcare Workers of Baltimore, Maryland, 2021-22,” Gladstone Gallery, 2023.
Frazier’s practice recalls figures in the social documentary tradition such as Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, David Goldblatt, and Jim Goldberg; and in the conceptual (post-)documentary tradition, figures such as Allan Sekula, Fred Lonidier, and Carrie Mae Weems.
I have in mind Saidiya Hartman’s historically grounded, Black feminist critiques of legality in Scenes of Subjection (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); as well as Glen Sean Coulthard’s Indigenous critiques of state recognition in Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
