LaToya Ruby Frazier in Conversation with Dawoud Bey (Video)

On Wednesday, October 15, Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with the department of photography at Parsons The New School for Design, presented a conversation between photographers LaToya Ruby Frazier and Dawoud Bey, followed by a book signing.

The recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, Frazier creates work that offers an incisive exploration of the legacy of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied by her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Her work also considers the impact of that decline on the community and on her family, and creates a statement both personal and truly political: an intervention in the histories and narratives of the region. Frazier and Bey, well-known for his community-based portraiture work, discussed  Frazier’s first book, The Notion of Family (Aperture, 2014), and the ideas and issues that inform her practice, along with the ways in which photography can provoke an active conversation in the larger social world.