Grandma Ruby's Refrigerator

Awarded a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2015, LaToya Ruby Frazier is a photographer who first trained the camera on her own life in a steel town in Pennsylvania. She has since documented sites of distress, including Flint, Michigan, through a lens that is intensely personal and political at the same time. This image of her grandmother’s refrigerator belongs to her earliest series, The Notion of Family. A visually dense image, it stands in for the artist’s grandmother, Ruby, whose house is filled with dolls, and for whom the kitchen is a center of gravity. The doors of the fridge are covered with family photos and prints of Frazier’s professional work, the latter printed at a larger scale, with evident skill in composition, framing, and direction. The two kinds of photography intermingle freely, not quite collapsing the bounds between art and vernacular photography, but suggesting that they are equally meaningful forms of representation. This image also serves to contextualize Frazier’s work—which has been lauded in major newspapers and has appeared in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions—through its first audience, her family. The refrigerator is a portrait of a proud grandmother as much as it is a snapshot of Frazier's early career.