Four Contemporary Queens of Photography
March 29, 2024
Contemporary American photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier uses her upbringing in the first Carnegie steel mill town of Braddock, Pennsylvania to fuel a creative force of social change through photographic recording of her surroundings. While many photographers following in the footsteps of the legacy left by Gordon Parks use “the camera as a weapon,” Frazier employs the medium to document the unique issue of environmental racism and how it has impacted herself, her family, and the larger community of Braddock, PA.
Using candid portraits of her great-grandfather “Gramps,” for example, Frazier documents the devastating long-term effects that being employed in the steel industry has had on his physical health. At large, her pictures of her family reflects the bleak reality the members of her community have been living in since the inception of the industry. Being raised in an environment where toxic fumes and polluted air are the standard olfactory stimulations, the visual is metal cranes and constructors, and the auditory is neverending industrial noise, Frazier creates images that depict the multifaceted dark reality of her upbringing. On a mission to use the photographic document to bring public awareness to the voiceless, Frazier successfully carves out a fine line between art photography and documentary. The photograph “In Gramps’ Pajamas” from her ”Home Body Series,” is a black-and-white self-portrait set in an abandoned wreck of a room with boarded up windows and artifacts of a past that has left the conditions in the room devastated. The artist captures herself shaking her head and obstructing her facial features while her figure is clad in her great-grandfather’s pajamas, standing close to a corner in the room beset with peeling paint. The picture reflects the generational trauma and long-term effects on the psyche of a person raised in an environment built on a foundation of racist abuse. To the viewer, the image looks as if it is a still from a horror film. The constructed environmental portrait reflects the conditions that Frazier, her family, and her community have suffered for as long as they have been in Braddock and the implications that such a past holds for future generations.
In contrast to the documentary style that Frazier uses (in a form of art-photographic style aimed at justice for the multigenerational suffering experienced by African Americans), contemporary American photographer and visual artist Lorna Simpson uses mixed media to challenge stereotypical depictions of black people. More specifically, black women and their bodies. Simpson’s multidisciplinary approach raises questions in the viewer about the nature of representation, class, identity, gender, race, and history.
Through her art, similarly to Frazier, Simpson rejects the apathy of white America towards Black struggle. She combines conceptual photography with painting along with elements of graphic design to achieve a striking deconstruction of the perception of black people in the public eye. Channeling black feminist thought as the center of her concept, she confronts the viewer with the racist messages found in contemporary mass media regarding African Americans women and their bodies. Simpson does this through an effective combination of image and text, notably in her work Screen 1 (1986). In it, she places three photographs of the legs of a black woman sitting down, wearing a white dress on a foldable black board crossed and framed by a dark wooden pane. Underneath the consecutive images, red bold text reads “Marie said she,” “was from Montreal,” “although.” On the flip side of the three foldable black boards, the phrase is finished with “she was from Haiti.” In the first two images, the hands of the woman are conservatively folded on her lap. On the third, a small model of a slave ship replaces her hands. Simpson addresses the multigenerational disregard and erasure of Black history and heritage in the eyes of white people. A discussion on displacement and border is stirred by her piece, in which she frames the interrogation and flippant interest white people tend to show in the origins of black people with blatant disregard for the racial charge in even posing such questions.
Simpson and Frazier both use the photographic medium to confront the viewer with the misunderstood and frequently ignored reality that they occupy as Black women in America. In their work, the viewer finds empathy with the artists and their experience. When the lens is oriented by Black women so successfully, the resulting images present a perspective unfamiliar to the common eye which is used to a white-instituted mass media spectrum. In the work of Simpson and Frazier, it is not only black feminine beauty that is captured, but the experience of trudging a landscape marked by institutional racism at every turn and found in every gaze. The result for the viewer, a rare and striking confrontation with the reality of the African-American female experience, serves as a striking and lasting example for photography as a means to challenge a legacy of racism and sexism.
Yurie Nagashima (長島 有里枝, born in 1973) is a major figure in modern Japanese photography who influenced the genre with her groundbreaking photo book titled Self-Portraits. The work, published by Dashwood books over the course of 24 years from 1992 to 2016 features Nagashima photographing herself at different points in her growth. As she transitions from a backpacker, to an art student, to a mother, and every stage in between, Nagashima reclaims the male gaze away from her body by often embracing the full nudity that characterizes the inconventional feminist aesthetic criterion of womanly self-love, independent of man.
Regarding the book, Nagashima discusses her artistic choice “In this book, I sequenced the images chronologically, so you can see the change. My personal interests also changed, and aging, too, is just another cause.” By taking up the space in her work with a series of images carrying a quality of confidence and nonchalance, sequentially photographed with less and less attention to the conventional Western art styles, Nagashima’s growth as an artist and as a woman reflects maturity and a shift away from herself and onto her child. This results in a selfless depiction of the unglamorous reality of being a woman in a society that expects traditional gender role behavior and patriarchal conformity.
On the other side of the world, at night in Boston, United States in the 1980’s, Nan Goldin Both also challenged the traditional photographic styles of the West and the subject matter that could be depicted or interpreted as art. Without overestimating her impact, Nan Goldin single-handedly revolutionized photography as a medium, as a genre, and its breadth of capability and accessibility. In her work “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” Nan Goldin photographs the friends that she surrounded herself by in the outskirts of urban society. The subjects that she depicts in her candid portraits taken informally, yet carrying a glorious color and vibration with every picture, are societal rejects: the LGBTQ+, sometimes HIV+, drug using, partying, hedonistic people that live at night, the only time when they are free to be themselves. By focusing on the emotional depth that photography allows for by simply capturing what the eye sees, Nan Goldin shifts the focus away from visual cliches and turns the camera inward. In collapsing the barrier between art and life, she expresses herself and how she lives with her art.
In contrast to other photographers who take snapshots of their daily experiences, people who purposely live the lives about which they would prefer to make art and pretend, Nan Goldin simply produces art from the life she already lives. Caring little for behavioral norms and what can and cannot be considered as art, Goldin captures the emotional closeness and distance that she and the people she loves feel on a daily basis towards one another. In a prominent example, “Nan and Brian in Bed,” using available light, Goldin sets up a camera, tripod and a self-timer facing the bed on which her and her partner Brian are about to have sex, and takes a series of images. In the style of a visual diary, Goldin’s lens sees the most intimate moment between the artist and her partner, and then right after, the distance between the two when the act has finished. By finding the male subject gazing away at a distance from the female, after he has gotten what he wants out of her (an agent for an orgasm), while the female’s eyes are still on him, the photograph illustrates the self-centered, objectifying, and fleeting nature of man in his momentary interest towards a partner. In a simple gesture of recording what happened, Goldin deconstructs and presents the all-too-often male-favoring dynamic between the sexes in heterosexual relationships. Exploring themes such as sex and drug addiction, the dependency on others for fulfillment, and the bleak reality of being a queer woman in the time period, Goldin’s image searches the female condition for all of its purported glamour in a mass-media context, but instead finds only emotional disregard and disappointment.
In stark contrast to societal expectations of feminine behavior, early in her book, Yurie Nagashima often ambivalently switches between a “butch” self-characteristic, photographing herself with short hairstyles and men’s clothing, and a “femme” persona, where she depicts herself in a more feminine manner. To the viewer, the culmination of the different styles and selves that Nagashima portrays occurs in the untitled photograph featured in her “Self-Portraits” where she, as the subject, is sat pregnant and relaxed on a dark red couch. Surrounded by cushions and plush toys, and clad in only panties, a biker jacket, and a red watch and red lipstick, Nagashima is casually flipping the viewer the middle finger. Her late stage belly is the focal point of the picture, serving to make the viewer consider the woman in her most powerful state, about to create life itself, and not caring about gender conformity or expectations. To a shocking result, the viewer sees an unlit cigarette hanging from Nagashima’s mouth, vertically corresponding to her swollen belly. In a radical feminist gesture, Nagashima is rejecting the expectations of motherhood. Additionally, a man is never shown in any of her photographs. Rather, the only other person depicted prominently is her son, who grows in front of the viewer’s eyes as she flips the pages. To the successful effect of eliminating the significance of the father in Nagashima’s own life equation, in pictures which capture the difficulty of bringing up a child, the artist frames herself as her own hero and provider.
Nagashima and Goldin both employed the camera as a tool for capturing daily life and turning that experience into art. The images Nagashima and Goldin made, while appearing simply to be snapshots of day-to-day experiences to an untrained eye in the time of the camera phone, (and at large, a time of massive accessibility to photography in the digital revolution), are in reality much more complex. They reveal an indelicate feminine sensibility that steers clear of the patriarchal values instilled in the medium of photography. Through seemingly careless and casual photographic technique, the two artists achieve a form of independence and create a space for feminist expression outside of the normative expectations of women both shooting and behaving that dominated at the time. In turns that had never been done during an era of strict aesthetic rules seen by a white-male dominated culture as essential to the photographic canon, the two female artists successfully subverted the standard and distinguished their unique perspectives as equally valid in being considered examples of fine art.