Photographers

LaToya Ruby Frazier (born 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania) is an American artist whose work in photography, video, performance, and social practice examines the intertwined issues of labor, environmental justice, systemic racism, healthcare inequality, and the lived realities of working‑class communities. Rooted in the legacy of social documentary photography of the 1930s and conceptual practices of the 1960s and ’70s, her work foregrounds collaboration, often involving the very people and communities who have experienced the structural inequalities she documents. Frazier began photographing her family and hometown at the age of sixteen, developing a sustained visual narrative that challenges stereotypical media portrayals of postindustrial America.

Her breakthrough project, *The Notion of Family* (Aperture, 2014), centers on three generations of women—herself, her mother, and her grandmother—as a way to address the effects of deindustrialization, environmental racism, and the collapse of steel‑town economies. The book earned the International Center of Photography Infinity Award and established Frazier as a leading voice in contemporary socially engaged photography. Subsequent bodies of work include *And From the Coaltips a Tree Will Rise* (2017), *The Last Cruze* (2020), and her multi‑year project *Flint Is Family in Three Acts*, a monumental account of families confronting the Flint, Michigan water crisis, which earned her the inaugural Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book Prize.

Frazier’s work is held in major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. She has exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, Seattle Art Museum, ICA Boston, Musée des Arts Contemporains de Grand‑Hornu, CAPC Bordeaux, and Mudam Luxembourg. Her practice extends beyond photography into activism and community‑based collaboration, emphasizing the political agency of image‑making and the necessity of long‑form storytelling for confronting racial and economic injustice.

Frazier has received numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), Creative Capital Award (2012), César’s Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship (2014), and the MacArthur Fellowship (2015). She currently teaches and lectures widely, continuing to use photography as a tool for empowerment, historical revision, and social transformation.