LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Notion of Family

Now available in a paperback edition, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s award-winning first book, The Notion of Family, offers an incisive exploration of the legacy of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied by her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. The work also considers the impact of that decline on the community and on her family, creating a statement both personal and truly political—an intervention in the histories and narratives of the region. Frazier has compellingly set her story of three generations—her Grandma Ruby, her mother, and herself—against larger questions of civic belonging and responsibility. The work documents her own struggles and interactions with family and the expectations of community, and includes the documentation of the demise of Braddock’s only hospital, reinforcing the idea that the history of a place is frequently written on the body as well as the landscape. With The Notion of Family, Frazier knowingly acknowledges and expands upon the traditions of classic black-and-white documentary photography, enlisting the participation of her family, and her mother in particular. In the creation of these collaborative works, Frazier reinforces the idea of art and image-making as a transformative act, a means of resetting traditional power dynamics and narratives—both those of her family and of the community at large.

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

Praise for The Notion of Family (Aperture, 2014)

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 Lightbox)

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 is well-known for his work as a photographer, and has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including a mid-career survey at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1995. He is a professor of art and a Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago.