Photography

NoteWorthy PhotoBook of 2024: LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity

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Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava.

The NighthawkNYC.com NoteWorthy PhotoBook of 2024: LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, Published by the Museum of Modern Art

When I met her at the Museum of Modern Art on May 10th, at the Preview of her stunning early mid-career retrospective, I told Ms. Frazier her book, LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, was my NoteWorthy PhotoBook of the Year. Yes, the year. Even though we’re barely half way through 2024 as I write this and there are still six full months to go). With all due respect to all the books not yet released as well as those I have not yet seen, Ms. Frazier  gets my 2024 Trophy as most recommended PhotoBook for her powerful & urgently important book, published to accompany and expand on the show of the same name. Frankly, she deserves a medal for the work she has done.

LaToya Ruby Frazier proudly showing me her new book, Monuments of Soilidarity at MoMA, May 10, 2024

Having begun taking Photographs at 16, she seemed to find her voice almost immediately. “I had decided when I was a teenager that I had to make work that was socially and politically conscious1,” she said.

Auspicious beginnings. The Notion of Family, 2016.

Her early work focused on 3 generations of her family and life in her hometown of Braddock, PA in her debut PhotoBook, The Notion of Family, in 2016, which announced her arrival to the world in memorable fashion. She subsequently turned her attention to the coalminers in the Borinage, Belgium, in And From the Coaltips a Tree Will Rise, in 2017. Returning the U.S., she documented the closing of the G.M. plant in Lordstown, Ohio in The Last Cruze, 2019, and the man-made water crisis in Flint, Michigan in Flint Is Family In Three Acts, 2022 in book form. All four books are NoteWorthy in their own right.

MoMA, May 12, 2024

Monuments of Solidarity is an overview of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work to date in what is a Show of the Year candidate along with Käthe Kollwitz, which happens to be installed right next to Monuments of Solidarity at MoMA. Monuments takes the viewer right up to the work shown in her most recent NYC gallery show, More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland, 2021-22, which I wrote about here. The piece, which consists of 18 Inkjet panels on IV stands, was recently fittingly acquired by the forward-looking Baltimore Museum.

Partial installation view, More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland, 2021-22, as installed at MoMA May 12, 2024. Each piece is in 2 parts. On the right-hand panel is a text written by the subject of her Photo on the left panel. You can see it installed at Gladstone Gallery in my look at it here.

There are a lot of great Artists in this country. You have your list. I have mine. There are also a lot of important Artists working here today. One thing that sets LaToya Ruby Frazier apart, in my view, is that, in addition to her poignant Photography, she brings her subjects right into her work. Though hers is the overall vision, the results feel collaborative. This serves to make the results unlike most of what’s come before.

Installation view. Flint Is Family section. May 12, 2024 including more compelling texts from her subjects accompanying her Photos.

After posing for the picture with her book, she asked me what I thought of her show. I told her I was very moved by the Photos she took with and about her Grandmother, now well-known images from her instant classic The Notion of Family. In them we see the Artist’s vision and talent were stunningly present from an early age, as if she was born with a camera in her hand, while we also get insights into her and her family’s life in her hometown. Braddock, PA, which in turn fueled her passion to inspire change and to right wrongs.

UPMC Braddock Hospital and Holland Avenue Parking Lot, 2011. The community hospital in ruins, where her grandmother passed.

After we see the passing of her Grandmother, the show took an immediate turn and from then on was focused on depicting crises effecting “everyday” citizens, working class people, and issues of race. 

MoMA, May 10, 2024

Monuments of Solidarity is not only a “PhotoBook.” It delves deeply into its subjects in a way I find every bit as powerful as her Photographs are. This is evidence of LaToya’s extraordinary way with people. Watching her at MoMA, she took the time to have an actual moment with everyone she encountered. Even me (we’d never met).

LaToya Ruby Frazier Takes on Levis, 2011, Stills from the Video which premiered on Art21. LaToya took issue with Levi’s after they featured her hometown, Braddock, PA, in an “Everybody’s Work Is Equally Important” ad campaign. As part of the campaign, Levi’s  opened a public Photo Workshop in SoHo. In response, LaToya put on a pair of Levi’s and in a performance in front of the Levi’s Photo Workshop, preceded to destroy them while wearing them. The intense Video is looped in the show. From the book, Monuments of Solidarity.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, the person, makes every bit as good, and memorable, an impression as her work does, though the intensity we see in pieces like her incredible Levi’s Performance Video remained under the surface.

MoMA, May 10, 2024

I think her people skills, which isn’t the right term for someone who is as genuine as Mr. Frazier is…make that her humanity, is a central reason why her Art is so powerful and so direct, project after project. LaToya gets to the heart of the issue and speaks to why it is important- for those directly involved, and for all of us, like very few Artists working today can.

Partial installation view. The Last Cruze, 2019 (recently acquired by MoMA), looks at the last Chevy Cruze to be made in Lordstown, Ohio after G.M. halted production and closed the plant, throwing all the workers out of their jobs.

Ms. Frazier’s work is compared by some to that of the F.S.A. (Farm Services Administration) Photographers of the 1930s, including Dorothea Lange. As I ‘ve showed, one thing of many that sets her work apart is that she foregrounds the experiences of her subjects right alongside her Photographs in texts they authored; something the FSA Artists didn’t do. In fact, I can’t think of any Artist who has done it as consistently as LaTory Ruby Frazier has.

On this spread from The Last Cruze PhotoBook the subjects of Photos accompany them in pieces they wrote.

She gives many, maybe event most, of the actual people she depicts in her projects, their own voice. Quite often their words take up more space in her books and in this exhibition than her Photos do! I can’t say I’ve ever seen that before, either. In the literal sense, her work truly is a collection of  “moments of solidarity” between Artist and subject.

Entrance to at MoMA as seen on May 10, 2024. The show is up through July 20th.

Two asides- Two coincidences struck me while preparing this piece. First, LaToya Ruby Frazier – Monuments of Soilidarity is installed right across the hall from the equally terrific Käthe Kollwitz at MoMA. Walking through one, and then the other, it was impossible for me to ignore how much in common they share. I wish I had asked LaToya what she made of Ms. Kollwitz’s show. Both Artists have made the “Art of social purpose” the center of their work.

“I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the sufferings of men, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high.” Käthe Kollwitz, 1867-1945, 2.

Her first major retrospective at an NYC museum (How is that possible?) makes an open and shut case for Käthe Kollwitz as one of the major Artists of her time, something that has been well-known in Germany and elsewhere, making it past time for the rest of the world to catch up.

Preparing this piece also reminded me of another young woman Artist who I selected as my NoteWorthy Art Book of 2024: Es Devlin. Though they’re from different parts of the world, and work in different mediums, they’re both making extraordinary inroads into the world with their work. As I wrote in my look at Es’s book, An Atlas of Es Devlin, she’s garnered unheard of media acclaim. LaToya was just named one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People of 2024.” That’s pretty amazing, of course, but I bet it doesn’t come with a cool Owl statuette!  ; )

Woman of Steel Button Pin, 2017

“Woman of Steel” reads the button on the cover. Though she’s not a steelworker, she could easily wear one and it would completely suit her in the literal sense.

*-Soundtrack for this piece is “Poverty” by Yemi Alade, from her album, Woman of Steel, fittingly, performed here live-

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  1. “Latoya Ruby Frazier Takes on Levi’s,” Art21 ↩
  2. As quoted, here. ↩

Harry Gruyaert- In Living Color

Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava (except *)

Freemont Street, Las Vegas. Nevada, USA., 1982. From West in the two-volume set East/West. *Photo by Harry Gruyaert, Magnum Photos.

Harry Gruyaert is one of any number of very fine European Photographers who are much better known at home than they are here. A good many of them have had long, accomplished, careers, and achieved substantial recognition on the other side of the pond. Here, in the USA, not so much. Last year, when I published my conversation with Harry Gruyaert, I was shocked to receive emails that said, “Thanks for introducing me to him.”

In 2017, 174 Harry Gruyaert Photographs were on view in eleven stations of the Paris Metro at the invitation of RATP, the Paris public transport operator. *Seen here in a still from the Harry Gruyaert: Photographer Documentary. Both of these Photographs may be seen in his recent book, Edges.

Really? Harry Gruyaert, who was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1941, is one of the Photographers responsible for bringing color Photography to the mainstream Fine Art world, along with William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Constantine Manos and others, after the early, pioneering though not as well known color work of Edward Steichen (going back to 1909!), Keld Helmer-Petersen, (in the 1940s), Saul Leiter and Fred Herzog (from the 1950s, on), and others. Harry was the subject of the recent Harry Gruyaert – Retrospective at FOMU Foto Museum in Antwerp, and the documentary film Harry Gruyaert: Photographer. He’s an Artist who’s work has appeared in eleven Paris Metro Stations and intriguing crops of his work have appeared on the cover of 68 Penguin Books Inspector Maigret detective novels by Georges Simenon. All of this is over and above the fact that he’s been a member of Magnum Photos since 1981 and is a former Vice President of the world’s foremost collective of Photographers.

What’s it going to take for some of these very accomplished Photographers to gain similar acclaim and following here?

The show’s entrance with Antwerp, Belgium, 1988, 13 1/8 x 19 3/4 inches. All prints in the show are Archival pigment prints; printed later.

Perhaps, in his case at least, the tide is beginning to change. Part of the reason Mr. Gruyaert hasn’t been better known here to this point may be that almost all of the PhotoBooks he released earlier in his career are long out of print making it very hard for anyone new to him to discover his work. Though I have had an interest in Mr. Gruyaert’s work, I’ve never seen any of his older books, like the legendary Morocco– even in rare book stores.

Blue, yellow and red- the colors of the covers of three of the most recent Harry Gruyaert monographs.

More recently, Thames & Hudson has released 4 new books over the past 5 years (Harry Gruyaert, 2015, a retrospective with the red cover, and best place to start exploring his work, the also excellent two-volume set East/West, 2107, Edges, 2019, and the just released Last Call, 2020), which are helping to bring his work back to the eyes of the PhotoBook world.

Harry Gruyaert at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, installation view. On the wall or in a book, Harry Gruyaert’s work tends to grab viewers at first sight.

With Harry Gruyaert at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, his first show in the USA in decades, the next step has been taken. After our conversation  last year from Paris, I finally had the chance to meet Harry at the opening. There he was, with Roger Szmulewicz, Director of Gallery51, his European dealer, on January 23rd. Harry told me this was his first USA show since the release of Morocco, which was published in 1990! Then, in keeping with the spirit of Last Call, which he shot in airports, Mr. Gruyaert, still a frequent traveler, told me he was off to Japan in two days.

Harry Gruyaert, left, chatting with Roger Szmulewicz, Director of Gallery51 at the opening.

As I learned in our conversation last year, Mr. Gruyaert is a fascinating, multi-dimensional, man, who has had a remarkable career and life, which has been characterized by being in the right place at the right time, in the right light, as was to be seen in spades on the walls of Howard Greenberg.

Gao, Mali, 1988, 13 1/8 x 19 5/8 inches, left and the haunting Quarzata, Morocco, 1986, 13 1/8 x 19 3/4 inches, right.

Here and now, in the moment, a good many of Harry Gruyaert’s most familiar, and beautiful, pieces were on view.

Province of Brabant, near Wavre, Belgium, 1981, 13 1/8 x 19 5/8 inches

For me, the show felt like reuniting with old friends. Province of Brabant, near Wavre, Belgium, 1981, in particular has long been among my favorites. There’s so many levels to this composition- the colors and their interaction, the distant landscape, the play of geometric shapes and shadows, the jarring angle the VW Beetle sits at, and then you get to the woman sitting in the car. It’s like a still from a movie, an outtake from a Michelangelo Antonioni Film he never made. Mr. Gruyaert, a long-time fan of Michelangelo Antonioni, and a former TV Director early in his career, produced a film that showed clips from Antonioni Films interspersed with some of his Photographs in the show The Image to Come at Cinémathèque Française in 2009.

Installation view. To the right of center works from his East/West series hang next to each other. LA, USA, 1982, the larger piece and Ostend, Belgium, 1982, to its left.

A little known chapter in his distinguished career also saw him in the right place to document the work of the legendary Artist Gordon Matta-Clark during some of the semial years of that Artist’s career. Most of those shots, which are seen frequently when Mr. Matta-Clark’s work is discussed, don’t bear his name, since they now belong to Mr. Matta-Clark’s estate, but the fact that Harry was there at the right time, taking remarkable (black & white) Photos are yet another part of his legend.

National Road #1, Boom, Province of Antwerp, Belgium, 1988, 20 7/8 x 31 1/2 inches

With such a long and distinguished career to dip into to mount shows from, here’s hoping there will be cause for many more Harry Gruyaert sightings on this side of Planet Earth.

 

Harry Gruyaert, far right, at the opening.

In person, in living color.

*- Soundtrack for this Post is “East West” by Morrissey from Kill Uncle.

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