In the world of photo books, exhibition catalogs hold a curious place.

They are, by definition, ancillary. They are not meant to be the primary method of presentation. While they are clear, they are not trend setting for aesthetics in book arts. They are meant to supplement, to complement, to add depth and to enrich some other experience, namely the experience in the museum or gallery. And yet, the expedition catalog is hardly trivial.

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“LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity”, edited by Roxana Marcoci
Published by MoMA, 2024
review by W. Scott Olsen

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In fact, the best of them have become epics. They have become deeply scholarly, wide-ranging in context, and provocative. The exhibition catalog is the thing you take with you after you have been moved by a gallery experience and want to know more, or it is the thing you pick up in advance because you are interested, for whatever reason, and your interest, your curiosity, your desire is fed with multiple courses of enriching information.

I have a new exhibition catalog on my desk. The photographer is LaToya Ruby Frazier. The exhibition at MoMA is called Monuments of Solidarity.  I doubt I will make it to MoMA for the exhibition, so I am grateful for this excellent collection of work and insight.

In a Forward, Glenn D. Lowry, the David Rockefeller Director at the Museum of Modern Art, writes,

“Latoya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity” is the first major museum survey in the United States dedicated to LaToya Ruby Frazier, a transformative artist who has spent the last two decades exploring the social and environmental impacts of postindustrial decline…Fiercely political and profoundly poetic, Frazer’s oeuvre encompasses photography, text, performance, moving images, and advocacy… For Monuments of Solidarity, Frazier has reimagined ten consequential bodies of work as immersive multimedia installations. These carefully composed structures reflect a new understanding of the role of the monument in contemporary society: not merely static sites of commemoration, they are radical expressions of a living collectivity created and sustained in the face of racial discrimination and social injustice.

Before I held this book, I had heard of LaToya Ruby Frazier. But what I knew was occasional. Before opening this book, I had no sense of context, no sense of placement. Here was a photographer outside of my viewing experience. However, after reading these essays and viewing these images, I feel a strong desire to get to the museum. We are always poorer for what we don’t know, and when a doorway is offered it’s exciting to walk through.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity contains several introductory, academic, and critical essays. The writing is highly referenced and oftentimes dense. It’s also deeply worthwhile.

In her opening essay, called “In Solidarity: A Notion of Family, A Nation of Sisters,” editor Roxanna Marconi (who is also the David Dechman Senior Curator and Acting Chief Curator at MoMA’s Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography) writes,

Frazier photographed her grandmother’s meticulously curated collection of porcelain dolls, which she’d begun to amass after the murder of one of her daughters. What could be interpreted as painful remembrance is instead framed as a portrait of Grandma Ruby’s individual aesthetic sensibility and her votivelike practice of honoring her family…Sharing the camera with her mother and staging visual framings with her grandmother, Frazier activated political solidarity among her kinswomen. The portraits, which frequently include mirrors, formally emphasize their subjects, double personas as authors and models…Like photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, Frazier has chosen the radical “eye” of the camera as her weapon against social injustice.

Later, in an essay by Emilie Boone, she writes,

Considering “On the Making of Steel Genesis” and earlier projects by Frazier through a Black feminist lens allows us to shed light on lives and creative engagements that have been silenced, pushed to the margins, or otherwise absented from the histories of photography. It also provides insight into one factor that makes these engagements so powerful: their incorporation of the image-making efforts of women from different generations.

In an essay by Oluremi C. Onabajo, we learn,

A self-described conceptual documentarian, Frazier is one in a lineage of makers who have engaged with photography to contest the conventions of documentary practice. At every turn, she defies the prevailing master narratives, their ideological scripts, fictions and constructed points of view.

Among the very best exhibition catalogs I have seen, this one is exceedingly smart. It is not trying to convince you to be interested. It is assuming you already are, and that interest demands a high level of information and respect.

Nonetheless, this book is, finally, an exhibition catalog. And one of its goals is to celebrate the exhibition itself. So, after the introductory essays, we get a floor plan of the exhibition and chapters that lead us through the various galleries with examples of the work. The images, as you might expect, are compelling and troubling, anger-making and loving. Each chapter shows us the layout of a gallery room, explains its intent, and presents the images. It’s a guided tour with deep context.

Holding this book in my hand, I cannot presume to reach the level of erudition, knowledge, and insight of the authors. What I can say, however, is that if you are interested in photography as a social commentary, this is an essential book. If you are interested in issues of feminism, race, economic justice, political injustice, and environmental justice and how the photograph can serve these issues, this is a necessary book.

I do not know if I will make it to MoMA while this exhibition is running, and for that reason, I am grateful for this book. I now have a rich resource for learning about an essential voice.

A note from FRAMES: Please let us know if you have an upcoming or recently published photography book.