CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/13/2024

LaToya Ruby Frazier, removing the contradiction between ideals and practice

Although LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work is revered for its social-activist, Black feminist world-building, certain images are also just great photographs—capable of delivering their message well beyond their original context. “Marilyn Moore, UAW Local 1112, Women’s Committee and Retiree Executive Board, (Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co., Lear Seating Corp., 32 years in at GM Lordstown Complex, Assembly Plant, Van Plant, Metal Fab, Trim Shop), with her General Motors retirement gold ring on her index finger, Youngstown, OH,” from Frazier's 2019 The Last Cruze series, is such an image. “Like the photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, Frazier has chosen the radical ‘eye’ of the camera as her weapon against social injustice,” curator and editor Roxana Marcoci writes, later citing Frederick Douglass's March 1865, late Civil War speech, "Pictures and Progress," in which "Douglass emphasized that pictures—a form through which humanity externalizes its thoughts and experiences—have the power to undermine racist authority and offset stereotypical portrayals of African Americans. 'Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers,' he intoned, 'and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.' Frazier wields the power Douglass identified in pictures to alter the moral orientation of a nation, awakening viewers to myriad crises and daring them ‘to remove the contradiction’ between ideals and practice.”