Self Portrait March (10 am), 2009

Latoya Ruby Frazier’s work revitalizes the legacy of great social photography. Documenting her family from the age of 16, her project The Notion of Family, of which this lot is a part, can rightly be positioned besides some of history’s most moving documentary photographs. Unlike many other photographers, unique to her process is that she is not looking from the outside in, but selflessly capturing the vulnerability of herself and her family, while simultaneously making commentary on the socio-political failings in our nation. In this way, her work functions to challenge the very foundation of social documentary photography, questioning how some of the most iconic imagery could have looked if taken by the subjects themselves.

Frazier is the direct product of her environment, growing up next to Andrew Carnegie’s first steel mill in Braddock, Pennsylvania, she embodies the scars left from the former days of big industry. Through her Self Portrait March (10 am) from 2009, offered here, we can, in a way, stand in her place, and more broadly, the places of the thousands of Americans, predominately poor and black, who suffer ill health from working in hazardous factories, and who’s decedents like Frazier, grew up breathing in polluted air and drinking toxic water. These former workers of Rust-Belt communities have seemingly disappeared from public conscience, but Frazier’s gaze confronts us so strongly, she demands we recognize their presence, their memory.

This arresting self-portrait is published in Frazier’s 2014 book A Notion of Family and is among her works that earned her the highly esteemed MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 2015. This image is in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum and is rare to come to market. Latoya Ruby Frazier is an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.