LaToya Ruby Frazier in Conversation with Dawoud Bey

This event is free for students with ID and Aperture Members at the $50 level and above.

Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with the Department of Photography at Parsons The New School for Design, is pleased to present photographers LaToya Ruby Frazier and Dawoud Bey in conversation, followed by a book signing. Recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, Frazier’s work 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 and Bey, well-known for his community-based portraiture work, will discuss the creation of Frazier’s first book, The Notion of Family (Aperture, 2014), and the ideas and issues that inform her practice, along with the ways in which photography can provoke an active conversation in the larger social world.

LaToya Ruby Frazier (born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, 1982) received her BFA in photography and graphic design in 2004 at Edinboro University, Pennsylvania, and her MFA in 2007 from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, New York. In 2011, Frazier completed the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and shortly thereafter was appointed Critic in Photography at the Yale University School of Art. She is currently Assistant Professor in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has received numerous grants and awards, including a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been included in exhibitions at major institutions worldwide.

Dawoud Bey (born in New York, 1953) began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs called Harlem, USA, which was later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide, at such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago; Barbican Centre, London; Cleveland Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of Arts; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; National Portrait Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, organized a mid-career survey of his work, Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975–1995, which then traveled to institutions throughout the United States and Europe. A major publication of the same title was also published in conjunction with that exhibition. Class Pictures was published by Aperture in 2007, and a traveling exhibition of this work toured to museums throughout the country from 2007 to 2011.

Image: LaToya Ruby Frazier, Momme, 2008

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the board and Members of Aperture Foundation.