n a cool evening in May, LaToya Ruby Frazier gathered with friends and strangers in a basement theater at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The communion was a 

, surveying more than two decades of photographic work. After a brief introduction by the curator Roxana Marcoci, Frazier walked over to a podium at the front of the room. She wore a blue silk suit, and her hair, a dark brown mass with sandy highlights, was styled into an afro. The artist looked like a figure pulled straight from Barkley L. Hendricks’s ethereal portraits.

“I’ve used my camera as a compass to direct a pathway toward the illuminated truth of the indomitable spirit of working-class families and communities in the 21st century,” Frazier said, reading from a recent essay. “For this reason, it is incumbent upon me to resist — one photograph at a time, one photo essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time — historical erasure and historical amnesia.”

This essay, which is printed in full at the beginning of the exhibition catalog, defined the center of the evening’s program, “A Credo on Solidarity,” which included a suite of creative responses to Frazier’s philosophy from other artists and scholars. The poets Shea Cobb and Amber Hasan performed spoken word, reading a long poem from a large brown scroll they unfurled onstage. Sandra Gould Ford, an artist, educator, and former steelworker, presented a slideshow illustrating Frazier’s thesis with photos, quotes and videos. There was sound art, featuring June Jordan’s 1982 poem “Moving Towards Home,” by Shala Miller; a biographical essay by the scholar Imani Perry; and an affecting dance by the video and performance artist Liz Magic Laser and her mother, the choreographer and dancer Wendy Osserman.

These pieces not only embodied the ideas in Frazier’s credo — subjectivity, power, art as a means of healing — they also testified to a critical component of the artist’s work. At the heart of 

 is the artist’s devotion to collaboration. Frazier was raised Baptist, and her faith is a clarifying tool for understanding her practice. She believes in empathetic listening and frequently cites agape love — a Christian idea that promotes selfless and unconditional care for others — as a principal tenet. Like James Baldwin, whom the artist counts among her influences, Frazier positions herself as an interlocutor, someone “called to stand in the gap between the working class and creative class communities.”

Several of the participants in “A Credo on Solidarity” had made images with her before. Frazier met Cobb and Hasan while working on 

(2016–20), a study of the government-made water crisis in the beleaguered Michigan city. She and Ford collaborated on the series 

On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford

 (2017), which featured Frazier’s photographs alongside Ford’s images to tell the story of labor conditions in a steel manufacturing company in Pittsburgh, Pa. By forging enduring alliances with her subjects — collaborating on art projects, designing a profit-sharing model that funnels resources back into the community, and giving people in the photographs final say on any accompanying text — the artist has upended the conventional dynamics of documentary photography. Her images are historical correctives that dignify working-class communities previously denied such recognition.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity

, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by Jonathan Dorado/MoMA.

“It’s always been a dream of mine to have a museum of workers’ thoughts,” Frazier, 42, told me two weeks before her communion of collaborators at MoMA. “What would it look like if there were monuments erected for workers and their families and their descendants instead of industrial capitalists?” We were sitting in a nondescript room in the museum, surrounded by tokens of a muted office life — dusty windows, an empty desk — and signed copies of Frazier’s exhibition catalog. In just a few days, her sprawling exploration of workers past, present, and future would open to the public.

, on view through Sept. 7, comes at an energizing time for the U.S. labor movement. From UPS drivers to Hollywood writers and actors, workers have won big contracts that guarantee higher wages, better health insurance, and stronger job protections. Even though union density remains stubbornly low, a 

 employees participated in hundreds of strikes across the country in 2023. Frazier’s show meets the demands of this moment by sharing the lessons of recent labor rights actions and presenting a record of contemporary civic engagement more generally. From chronicling how the local United Auto Workers union in Lordstown, Ohio, protected employees impacted by the General Motors plant closure to showing Flint residents using innovative technology to procure clean water for themselves, Frazier’s images affirm how crucial collaboration and information exchange among the working class

is to liberation work. “I’m concerned with getting the general public more knowledge about certain laws and policies that are impacting our basic human rights,” Frazier said. “We don’t have time to wait on our elected officials or mass media to tell the right stories or the full truth.” Viewers are encouraged not only to identify with other workers but also to connect the dots of their oppression and, eventually, enact change in their own communities.

Across the exhibition’s eight rooms, Frazier has erected monuments composed of photographs, extensive first-person testimonies, video projections, and audio pieces that detail how people in the United States survive government negligence and corporate greed. They span the length of her career, from the deeply intimate images of her mother and grandmother to her homage to the labor activist Dolores Huerta. The artist choreographs objects in each room, arranging the images, text, and video and sculptural and architectural installations to encourage different kinds of meditation. “The way she has rethought both conceptual and documentary art practices to create what is truly an artistic activist practice is what attracted me to her,” Marcoci said of Frazier and her work. To the curator, this exhibition is “not about representing people exclusively through [Frazier’s] lens, but through their own testimony.”

More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland

, she affixes portraits of medical and social service providers battling health inequity and organized abandonment in Baltimore to stainless-steel IV poles set six feet apart. The intervals abide by the social distancing guidelines the CDC recommended during the early stages of the pandemic, and the first-person testimonies, in which residents describe the steps they took to launch a community health program, are edited so that they can be read in about 15 to 20 minutes, the average length of a doctor’s visit. For the room holding 

 (2019), the artist’s epic documentation of union-led efforts to keep the General Motors plant in Lordstown open, she presents the images and testimonies on an imposing aluminum-and-steel structure that 

, where the Chevrolet Cruze hung as it moved between stations. “It’s a social sculpture. It’s there to fight historic amnesia, it’s there to uplift collective memory,” Frazier said. “But in order to consume these images and texts, you’ve got to give something of yourself. I want your own physical labor and energy and emotion.” Only two bodies can fit between each hanging display, which puts viewers in the shoes of employees who stood for hours installing parts and inspecting the vehicles.

Frazier’s work has always made demands, but of whom has shifted throughout the years. In 2000, she began taking pictures of her mother and grandmother in their hometown of Braddock, Pa. Frazier remembers working with the family matriarchs to create images that she would take back to her classes at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania (now known as PennWest Edinboro) and her master’s seminars at Syracuse University in upstate New York. Her work from these years, which would become 

(2001–14), offers an intimate perspective of her home city, a once-prospering industrial town developed around a steel plant founded by the 19th-century robber baron Andrew Carnegie. Once the steel industry collapsed in the 1980s, the area succumbed to hardship. Frazier, who was born in 1982, grew up in a deindustrialized municipality blighted by unemployment, high rates of chronic illness (Frazier has lupus, her mother had cancer, and her grandmother died of complications from pancreatic cancer), government abandonment, and racist policies that further entrenched existing equalities. Her family, like many Black working-class people, suffered from the Reagan administration’s political animus, which included endorsing union-busting tactics that killed thousands of factory jobs.

Part of Frazier’s attraction to photography came from what it made possible. She did not have a conventional, tight-knit nuclear family with traditional photo albums that memorialized generations of kin. Frazier lived with her Grandma Ruby in one half of a duplex that they shared with Grandma Ruby’s stepfather, a retired steel mill worker. Her earliest images responded to a world that, because of race and class, tried to render Frazier and her family invisible. A photo like 

(2005) echoes the kind of casually intergenerational studio portraits found in family albums, while 

 (2008) contrasts with images of middle-class Black life promoted by popular media like 

. Grandma Ruby, who Frazier would later learn was battling cancer at the time, rarely wanted to be photographed, so many of the images of her in this series have a furtive gaze. It was easier for Frazier to make portraits with her mother, an enthusiastic participant in the process. “It was actually the primary way we related to each other,” she said. The work also, in Frazier’s words, delayed her family’s demise, because she “was able to generate resources to pay for our hospital visits and utilities.” She said, “If I didn’t make those portraits with my mother and grandmother, we would have all been dead sooner.” In this way, Frazier’s work operates from an insistence of presence on both an aesthetic and material level.

Frazier credits Ruby, a protective disciplinarian, for her early interest in art and image making — and not just because her grandmother pushed her into gifted programs and mock trial teams and encouraged her to play the viola and guitar, but also because Ruby had her own artistic inclinations. She collected porcelain dolls, which Frazier says “she had an interesting way of choreographing,” and taught the artist about arranging objects in a space. Glimpses of this can be seen in the backdrop of 

 (2002). These photographs also reflect where Frazier was in her visual arts education. As an undergraduate student, she met her mentor Kathe Kowalski, a strict and sagacious professor who taught notoriously demanding classes and reminded Frazier of Ruby. During one instructive conversation, Kowalski gave Frazier three books: Eugene Richards’s 1994 photographic study 

; and a museum catalog for a Carrie Mae Weems exhibition. “Showing the images of your mother and grandmother is important,” she told Frazier. “I’m expecting you to show your work.” So the artist did, publishing them in the monograph 

 A year later, Frazier was named a MacArthur fellow.

Zion, Her Mother Shea, and Her Grandfather Mr. Smiley Riding on Their Tennessee Walking Horses, Mares, P.T. (P.T.’s Miss One Of A Kind), Dolly (Secretly), and Blue (Blue’s Royal Threat), Newton, Mississippi

The artist relied on Kowalski’s words when, in 2016, she documented the water crisis in Flint, Mich. The project was initially a commission for Elle magazine, but Frazier expanded it into a three-part series after connecting with Shea Cobb and her daughter Zion, then eight. Their dynamic and relationship to Flint mirrored parts of Frazier’s own childhood, which compelled her to keep making images of them. She became more than a witness, embedding herself into the texture of their lives. She helped people in Flint pay their utility bills and also helped lead the grassroots initiative that led to the installation of an atmospheric water generator on a vacant lot. The machine, created by Army veteran Moses West, extracts moisture from the air and condenses it into water. “I didn’t swoop in to help them; I went in and shouldered the crisis with them,” Frazier said. “They were already powerful. They already had a solution.”

This isn’t the first time Frazier has combined her documentary efforts with material contributions. In 2011, while participating in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, she drove home to Braddock on the weekends to join protests and civil disobedience campaigns to save the town’s hospital. That experience inspired a series of images that analyzed the hospital’s closure alongside a concurrent Levi’s campaign that used Braddock as its backdrop. When the Whitney acquired that work, 

If Everybody’s Work Is Equally Important?

 (2010–13), Frazier donated the funds to a free clinic in the borough. In Flint, Frazier raised over $50,000 for the atmospheric water generator.

Frazier, in her words, is “obsessed with trying to use photographs to invert and redistribute wealth and power.” In addition to giving money out of her own pocket, she is meticulous about how she names her images. Look at the titles in 

. They brim with details of the people depicted: names, location, and, occasionally, a few words describing their actions. Frazier

has previously cited Dorothea Lange’s work as a source of motivation and frustration. A photo like

 gestures toward an empathetic vision, but the lack of information about Florence Owens Thompson and her three children reinforces a hierarchy that puts the image maker ahead of the subject. While working for the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal–era agency focused on aid for the rural poor, Lange took extensive field notes for captions she intended to accompany her photographs. Lange was frustrated that 

, which over time became one of the most iconic representations of the Great Depression, frequently appeared without any context. When Frazier first saw the image, she was struck by the way this erased not only Lange’s work but also Owens’s voice. In a subversion of these erasures, Frazier includes informative titles or, as in later works like 

 and the Baltimore community health workers series, excerpts of transcribed conversations. The goal is always to elevate subjects so that they supersede the photographer in the image-making process.

Frazier refers to the people in her photographs as collaborators, rather than subjects. That praxis is most evident in her series 

, which she created with Ford. The show, which was originally exhibited at what is now the August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh, includes photographs and cyanotypes made by Frazier; accident reports, blueprints, and other critical archival documents Ford saved from her job as a clerk and secretary at the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company; and images taken by Ford, a fellow artist. The pair met at the Women and Girls Foundation’s conference in Pittsburgh in 2015 and connected over their shared histories: they discovered they had lived at Talbot Towers, a housing project in Braddock, at the same time, and both women’s lives were shaped by the steel industry in southwestern Pennsylvania. A plan to collaborate soon formed. “She was very excited about my personal history, things that I had done as an artist in the city of Pittsburgh and the challenges that I have addressed,” Ford told me recently. The series, as displayed in Pittsburgh and now at MoMA, is a dignified record of Ford’s personal and work life.

An intuitive sense of dignity and respect guides Frazier’s oeuvre, especially the images in 

. The photographs and the testimonies from Lordstown’s General Motors factory employees were originally published as a photo essay in The New York Times Magazine in 2019. Although Frazier has spent her life commemorating workers, 

 seems like the fullest realization of her aims. In this series, more than the others, Frazier arrives at a kind of holy place with her participants. First installed as an exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, the portraits are staged with a near biblical profundity: a meeting of the UAW Local 1112 president and comrades can be read as a spiritual congregation; an image of union member Pamela Brown and her great-granddaughter mimics the posture of Madonna and child. “I describe the people in this exhibition as the prophets and apostles of our time,” Frazier told me.

To Timothy O’Hara, who served as vice president of the UAW Local 1112 in Lordstown, Frazier’s approach to the plant closure felt different from that of other documentarians who descended upon the town after the GM announcement. “She knew what we were going through because of her background and where she came from in Pennsylvania,” he said. “It never felt like it was just another story to her — it felt like she had a mission.” Given the way that collaborators talk about Frazier and the way the artist talks about herself, it makes sense that she counts figures like Frederick Douglass among her influences. In the way that Douglass believed photography could challenge slavery and racism, Frazier believes her images can enact social change. Photography is an extension of her activism. Where others might see contradictions — hundreds of protesters occupied MoMA in February to call attention to the genocide of Palestinians, a topic on which the museum’s leadership has been silent —she sees an occasion to extend the work.

 refuse to not use my platform,” Frazier said when I asked her how she negotiates her radical politics with the positions of Gladstone Gallery, which represents her, and the museum. “Like if I went into debt to get a bachelor of fine arts and a master of fine arts, that is my platform. So I’m going to stand on it. And I’m going to find ways to reform it, right? I’m a reformer.” In that vein, the artist says she makes space to foster conversations about current issues. A panel on solidarity that took place on May Day included a Columbia professor who spoke about the protests on campus. “I seized the moment and made sure that there was programming where you could meet people from Flint, where you could meet people who are talking about a free Palestine,” she said.

Frazier takes her position as an artist bridging the gap seriously. She draws on Baldwin’s 1962 essay “The Creative Process” in her 

, from which she read in May: “Society must accept some things as real; but [the artist] must always know that the visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and all our achievements rests on things unseen.”

, Frazier trains her gaze on the most historically unseen members of society. She ushers the workers — Black, brown, poor, chronically ill — to the foreground. Through images and text, she insists on their dignity and creates a lasting celebration of their humanity. By the time visitors have absorbed these stories, they have, hopefully, gained a new perspective. “They think they’re looking at an art exhibition,” Frazier told me near the end of our conversation, as her lips curled into a smile, “but it’s really a spiritual transformation.”

Hammer&Hope

Lovia Gyarkye

Contributions

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4

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Monuments to Workers

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