LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier: In my home, we didn't have a family album. And that's the first thing you do, you know, when you're making friends with other teenagers and other kids, you go over to someone's house, you pull out your family album and you say, look at my family members. I didn't have that to offer. And so, I wanted to take it upon myself to be the family photographer, but make these portraits of things that, again, were happening. And they might not have been the images of people smiling. It might not be of people at, you know, Thanksgiving Dinner or opening Christmas gifts. I was interested in the tenderness and the cruelty of what was really happening, to how my family was being dismantled and how I didn't have any control, because I was just a kid, over what was happening. I was a helpless kid. So, again, I wanted to make my own family album that spoke to these types of painful realities instead of ignoring it. And I think that there's a power in that, not that it would heal me or that it’s cathartic, but to be able to confront that.