LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier: I'm LaToya Ruby Frazier.

For ten years, I've been in this search of trying to balance out the poetics and politics of documentary photography.

Narrator: Documentary photography is a tradition that dates largely to the Great Depression of the 1930s. At that time, the Farm Security Administration hired photographers to bring attention to the plight of the rural poor.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: I would always wonder, when I looked at those images, what those images would have been like if they weren't used for government propaganda. What they would have looked like if they were actually shot by the people who really experienced the Great Depression.

I was born in 1982, and by the 1980s, in particular, in Braddock, Pennsylvania, which is a historical steel mill town, the steel industry had already crashed. So, the only type of families left were families like mine that were fragmented, that had no type of social or economic power.

Narrator: To hear in depth about one of these projects—The Homebody Series, a group of domestic interiors–please tap the screen.