LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Steady Gaze

Self-Portrait with Shea and Her Daughter Zion in the Bedroom Mirror, Newton, Mississippi. 2017

With a photograph whose essential subject is infinity, it’s hard to know where to begin. If you weren’t familiar with the individuals depicted, you might assume that the self of the title is the woman directly in front of the bedroom mirror. But the photographed self is embedded: LaToya Ruby Frazier, also visible in the bedroom mirror, is in the background, at smaller scale, observing Shea Cobb and her daughter, Zion, as she had been for months. Well before taking this photograph, over months back in Flint, Michigan, Frazier and her camera were right with Zion and Shea in their everyday moments: doing homework after school, eating at their favorite diner, and at bedtime, avoiding the contaminated city water running through their drains, instead waterfalling bottled water onto their teeth as they brushed.

In Frazier’s photographs, power springs from the interior. This is where the matriarchal dynamics of The Notion of Family, her body of work of origin, play out: within the walls of her Grandma Ruby’s self-created refuge in Braddock, Pennsylvania. There, through the shared, complicated, and revelatory act of deep looking, she, her mother, and her grandmother built a family album, a story of resistance, a fortress against the environmental and racial injustice just outside their door.

Frazier and Shea aren’t related by blood, but this picture sees them becoming family. Born just two years apart, they are artists who became advocates and activists. They are, with Zion, summoned to Newton, Mississippi, by a photograph: In the midst of the Flint water crisis, Shea’s father, Mr. Smiley, sent her a picture of herself from her childhood, drinking water straight from a spring in the ground, back on their family farm. During their time in Newton, Shea and Zion re-root themselves in the land, Zion learning to care for Mr. Smiley’s beloved Tennessee Walking Horses. Both are living among the personal mementos and ephemera collected on Self-Portrait’s dresser: emblems of other horses, a jewelry box, a handwritten page kept in the corner of the mirror, a vignette portrait from the past, family photos tucked into other family photos.

When I say this is a photograph of infinity, I am talking about the way that in Frazier’s work, the mirror functions as a tool of framing, a means of reflection and enhanced seeing, and a portal that enlarges the world of the picture beyond its physical dimensions. Frazier isn’t the only one doing the observing here. The mirror allows her, Shea, and Zion to picture themselves and each other, simultaneously, equally, individually, and collectively.

We witness them from many surfaces too, each self reflected in the other. It’s a photograph about the power of photography to connect to the past and the ancestral, and to link to the future. Here, made visible, is the current of Frazier’s work that runs north to Flint, to autoworkers in Ohio, home to Braddock, and west to Noah Purifoy’s sculptures in the desert. It’s in Zion’s absorbing look, and it is embodied fully in Shea Cobb, the core and center of this composition. “Poetry becomes my ship of hope. And I just write as much as I can to stay free,” she said in a talk in 2022. As she stands in front of the bedroom mirror in her father’s house, her gaze is both strength-summoning and introspective. I think of a line from Shea’s poem “No Filter,” included in Frazier’s Flint Is Family, in which she speaks to the possibility of being able to drink the water of the polluted river that runs through her hometown: “What could I do, if I could taste God?”¹
—Rebecca Bengal

Rebecca Bengal is the author of the collection Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists. Her writing has been published by the Oxford American, the Paris Review, Lithub, Vogue, Southern Cultures, the Believer, the Guardian, and the Criterion Collection, and she has contributed short fiction and essays to photography books by Justine Kurland, Carolyn Drake, Danny Lyon, Kristine Potter, and Paul Graham.

Self-Portrait October 7 (9:30 a.m.). 2007

This photograph stopped me in my tracks. It was in a group show. I don’t remember the name of the show, or the year, or the other works in the exhibition. I was walking through it, looking, and this photograph didn’t just slow me down, it brought me to a halt. This was my first encounter with LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work.

The look on her face. The set of her body. Seated, leaning ever so slightly forward with a steady gaze.

Self-portraits do something unique in art and in art history: they give us insight into how the maker saw themself, and the relation of their personhood to their art-making process. The best of them—the really great ones—go beyond conveying a likeness or projecting a persona. They show us a person in the world, responding to and being shaped by their circumstances at a particular moment in their life. I’m thinking of the late Rembrandt self-portraits: his face wistful and weary, but with a live spark in his eyes that tells us he’s not done yet. After years of performing for the camera with her lithe and glamorous body, the artist Hannah Wilke reveals a different level of grit, clarity, presence, and power in her late Intra-Venus (1991–93) photographs, which are stark and blunt in their depiction of the toll of illness and cancer treatments.

Frazier’s Self-Portrait October 7 (9:30 a.m.) depicts the photographer looking directly into the camera, and through the camera, directly at us, the viewer. Her expression communicates complexity—a sense of awareness, self-possession, thoughtfulness. Vulnerable but also resolute.

The composition of the photograph is intentional and confident. The lighting from below is watery, as though reflected from a mirror. The framing includes a stretch of empty wall, leaving ample space around the figure.

There is a certain gender ambiguity, or defiance, in her presentation—the set of her bare torso is reminiscent of a way young men are often posed, and is in contrast to conventional come-hither poses or displays of femaleness. Frazier’s bareness and beauty are part of what makes this photograph so brave. But this picture is not about the beauty of the sitter; the photograph takes hold of our gaze and focuses us in to consider this person’s internal life: their thoughts, perspective, circumstances.

More than anything, this is a portrait of a young artist. This person with their level gaze seems to have many things to say, many things to show us. To me, this photograph clearly announced the arrival of an important young voice. It acts as a wedge to cut into the canon and make space for itself. The photograph says more than “I am here.” It says “I’m ready.”
—Zoe Leonard

Zoe Leonard is an artist working with photography, sculpture, and site-specific installation. She lives and works in New York City and Marfa, Texas.