The Feeling is Real: LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Photograph and Fact

• In Event: Alternative Views: Photography, Self-Representation and Fact in Contemporary American Art and Culture

Abstract

The photograph and its tangled relationship to fact has played a significant role in hitching bodies to social meaning and identity in the United States since the nineteenth century. But little scholarly attention has been paid to the ways that contemporary artists’ constructions of identity disrupt the historic limits of photographic meaning and open new potential ways of seeing and being. This paper will examine LaToya Ruby Frazier’s self-portraits as modes of dissent by arguing for a subversive understanding of photographic facticity during the Obama Era in which particularity and subjectivity are constitutive of knowledge rather than antithetical to it.

In positioning self-portraiture at the confluence of activism and art, LaToya Ruby Frazier (born Braddock, PA, 1982) uses her camera and her body to declare, “I'm a human being and my life has value and I refuse to be erased.” With a focus on her family, Frazier’s photographic series The Notion of Family documents the liminal place between the stark abandonment of deindustrialization and a continued battle with the environmental and social effects of surviving in industry’s wake. Wielding the legacy of social documentary photography as a conceptual tool, Frazier’s collaborative self-portraiture undermines both modern and postmodern approaches to photographic veracity by tethering identity construction to social justice activism.

Through her deft manipulation of photographic history and realism, Frazier’s camerawork points out the myriad acts of erasure in a “post-identity” cultural landscape in favor of what literary critic Paula Moya terms “a realist perspective.” By focusing on the ways that Frazier’s self-portraits enact aesthetic and metaphorical identifications that upset photographic objectivity, this paper will argue that Frazier’s artwork produces a photographic realism that is simultaneously factual and felt. It will ask: In what ways does Frazier’s camerawork redefine the material boundaries, aesthetics and politics of photographic realism in a contemporary cultural landscape that seeks to repress her experience as real? Guided by Moya’s literary theory and the feminist scholarship of bell hooks in tandem with contemporary writings on identity, emotion and performance, this paper will examine how Frazier occupies intersectional positions rejecting simplified representations of blackness, womanhood, and class in favor of messy and relational expressions of reality. In doing so, Frazier subverts boundaries between genres and expands photography’s histories.

Author

• Natalie Zelt, University of Texas at Austin