LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Notion of Family

Format: Paperback / softback
Number of pages: 156
Number of images: 100
Publication date: 2016-10-15
Measurements: 9.5 x 10.75 x 0.6 inches
ISBN: 9781597113816

LaToya Ruby Frazier (born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, 1982) received her BFA from Edinboro University, Pennsylvania, in 2004, and her MFA from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, New York, in 2007. She has received numerous grants and awards, including a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2014 USA Weitz Fellowship, and 2015 MacArthur Fellowship. Frazier teaches in the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is a visiting critic at Yale University. Her work has been included in exhibitions at major institutions worldwide.

Dennis C. Dickerson is the James M. Lawson, Jr. Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of several titles focusing on American labor history and the civil rights movement, including Out of the Crucible: Black Steel Workers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875–1980 (1986).

Laura Wexler is a professor of American studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University, as well as the founder and director of the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale. Her books include the award-winning Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (2000).

Dawoud Bey (born in New York, 1953) has for decades made groundbreaking and evocative work about the histories of Black communities. His numerous honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. A major career retrospective of his work, An American Project, was co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2020–22). Bey holds a master of fine arts degree from Yale University School of Art and is currently professor of art and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998. His books include Class Pictures (Aperture, 2007), Seeing Deeply (2018), Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities (Aperture, 2019), and Street Portraits (2021).

“Frazier offers a perspective from the inside, and her images achieve a muted power without being sentimental or sensational.”—The Editors, Bookforum

“Frazier's challenging and haunting photographs have previously brought this story to museums and galleries, but in this, her first book, she adds writing to create a powerfully stark family portrait. The brilliance of this volume, and Frazier's work, is in the way it manages to be both documentary and art, deeply intimate and widely important, relentless but so very necessary.”—Jillian Steinhauer, Hyperallergic

“Frazier reimagines the tradition of social documentary photography by approaching a community not as a curious or concerned outsider but as a vulnerable insider.”—Maurice Berger, New York Times Lens blog

“In her first book, Frazier explores themes of economic inequity, racism and personal politics through three generations of her own family, and documents the tolls that big injustices can have on small families and communities alike.”—Phil Bicker, TIME