Concept

For my personal study, I wanted to focus more on the area of the individual and making it more about my background within Jersey rather than the Island itself. I wanted this study to be very personal as I want the topic to be surrounding around me and to highlight mainly my identity.

I wanted to take on parts of the identity project for my inspiration as I believe that the discovery of myself and the struggles that are so personal to me, definitely make up the importance of what the island means to me and what the society has influenced. I was planning to direct my personal study down the route of being linked to my struggle with an eating disorder and depression. These topics have played a huge role in my life and still do challenge me to this day, so I believe this study to be incredibly personal to me with clear concepts of my experiences within Jersey regarding these areas.

Living in a small island community, being isolated from the mainland can have a psychological effect on islanders and their mental health. Being consumed by the routine of seeing the same people and living among the same formats of the island can really cause someone to spiral and fall into heavy depressive episode and many things can come off from that episode.

—- Mind map —-

—- Moodboard —-

—- Ideas —-

I wanted to adapt a similar approach to that of what Daniel Butt and Emma Price have done in previous Hautlieu Photobooks. They have both considered the idea of photographing singular objects in the centre of a flat coloured background. I thought I would follow this route similarly with capturing images of items that present my area of study.

I had the idea to photograph the medical wristbands that I had to wear during my stay in the hospital, medication that I was prescribed to help with my depression and appetite, bandages that I had to wear after blood tests and possibly some comfort items that I was allowed to have during my stay in hospital.

Reiner Riedler also followed this approach by photographing a variety of medical equipment and dropping a plain background behind the image. I would hopefully like to follow a similar route to this by trying my best to photograph medical equipment that I had to use on a daily basis.

Frazier’s image “Momme Portrait Series (Floral Comforter)” depicts her and her mother standing against a comforter with a floral print, they are both dressed casually, likely in pyjamas, and they stare emotionlessly directly at the camera. They image is split in half by each figure, like a mirror, showing them as if they are reflections of one another, allowing the viewer to compare and contrast them. The image is in black and white, contrasting the mostly block colours worn by the figures and the repeating pattern of the comforter behind.

In an interview, Frazier said “The Notion of Family responds to that call to suspend the passive aestheticism that turns abject poverty into an object of enjoyment.“, which can be seen through Frazier’s creative choices for the image. Frazier’s work often explores her family’s experience as a group of black steelworkers, focusing on the female perspective living in the industrial city of Braddock. This idea of realistically depicting poverty is shown with Frazier’s decision to show her and her mother looking a lot more casual and a little messy compared to the average portrait, focusing on showing them in natural way instead of glamorising their lives and appearances.

The comforter in the background is covered in a floral pattern, flowers often being associated with femininity and further pushing Frazier’s focus on the female experience in Braddock, “I needed to produce a photo-history book on three generations of women (1925-2014) that dealt with segregation, deindustrialisation, environmental racism, health care inequality and gentrification.” As Black women, Frazier and her mother would have likely experienced these injustices themselves and them standing against the floral comforter staring blankly at the camera could represent their dehumanisation experienced due to racism and sexism and only being seen as an object of white male desire, or could represent them reclaiming their femininity as black women are often stereotyped as masculine and undesirable, and either of these meanings fit into Frazier’s desire to depict her and her family’s history with oppression.

“When it comes to fighting racism the media are part of the problem, they perpetuate myths and stereotypes about Black people; they lie by omission, distortion and selection, they give racists inflated importance and respectability“, Frazier’s quest to combat racism through her photography is seen through all of her work, alongside this image. As said earlier, Frazier and her mother can be seen as reclaiming their femininity but it could also be said that they are standing proudly in front of the camera reclaiming their identity’s as black women, combatting harmful stereotypes against black women that spawned as a result of white supremacy and the patriarchy. Unlike how she said the media does, Frazier does not omit a single detail from her depiction of herself and her mother, reflecting them in a more natural and realistic light, using the power of photography to tell her own story instead of letting it be told by someone else.

LaToya Ruby Frazier was born in 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania, and currently lives and works in Chicago. An artist and activist, LaToya Ruby Frazier uses photography, video, and performance to document personal and social histories in the United States, specifically the industrial heartland. Having grown up in the shadow of the steel industry, Frazier has chronicled the healthcare inequities and environmental crises faced by her family and her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. The artist employs a radically intimate, black-and-white documentary approach that captures the complexity, injustice, and simultaneous hope of the Black American experience, often utilizing her camera and the medium of photography as an agent for social change. Her 2016 Flint is Family project traces the lives of three generations of women living through the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

“Flint is Family”

In 2016, LaToya Ruby Frazier spent five months living in Flint, Michigan with three generations of women–the poet Shea Cobb, her mother Renee, and daughter Zion–observing their day-to-day lives as they endured one of the most devastating ecological disasters in US history: the water crisis in their hometown. The artistic result of Frazier’s time there is reflected in the works presented in “Flint is Family,” opening August 2019 at the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University.

“Through photographs, videos, and text I use my artwork as a platform to advocate for others, the oppressed, the disenfranchised,” says Frazier. In “Flint is Family,” Frazier explores at the level of community, the effects of the water crisis in Flint–where black residents make up 54% of the population and 40% of the population lives below the poverty line. “When I encounter an individual or family facing inequality, I create visibility through images and story-telling to expose the violation of their rights.”

By portraying the daily struggles of the Cobb family, Frazier used a tight focus to create a story about the impact of a systemic problem disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. Citing the social documentary work of Gordon Parks’ and Ralph Ellison’s 1948 “Harlem is Nowhere”–which highlighted the social and economic effects of racism and segregation–as an influence, Frazier rejected the voyeuristic photographs that emerged from outside media sources and instead collaborated closely with her subjects through photographs, capturing intimate moments along with the myriad challenges the family faced without access to clean water. In September 2016, Frazier published her images of Flint in Elle magazine in conjunction with a special feature on the water crisis. Like Parks, Frazier used the camera as a vehicle and agent of social change.

“By hosting the Louisiana premiere of Frazier’s work at the Newcomb Art Museum,” says Monica Ramirez-Montagut, museum director, “we are bringing meaningful, enriching, and transformative exhibitions of socially-engaged art that explores the concerns of communities both on and off campus, as well as recognizing underrepresented communities and the contributions of women to the field. Frazier’s artistic practice centers on the nexus of social justice and cultural change and tells an important story of the American experience that certainly echoes with our own Louisiana environmental crisis and pollution.”

“The Notion of Family”

In 2015, her first book about how she, her mother, and grandmother survived environmental racism in historical steel mill town Braddock, Pensylvania, The Notion of Family, received the International Center for Photography Infinity Award. The Notion of Family, documents the decline of Braddock, Pennsylvania—a once-prosperous steel-mill town that employed generations of African American workers—alongside the hardships of Frazier’s family, who grew up there. Issues of class and race underscore the mostly black-and-white photographs in the collection, which is arranged as a kind of family album: intimate, collaboratively produced portraits of Frazier and her mother in mirrors and on beds, are presented with derelict scenes of collapsed buildings, vacant lots, and boarded-up stores.

“One of my goals is to disrupt the privileged point of view that only educated and elite practitioners can create work about the poor or disenfranchised,” she tells the artist Dawoud Bey in their interview for the book. “My mother did not have to read Roland Barthes to understand death in a photograph.”

LaToya on the subject of her first monograph, “The Notion of Family”

Frazier provides short texts with each image—wistful snippets of memory and anecdote merge with facts and statistics. Illness is nearly a constant. As Laura Wexler points out in an accompanying essay, Braddock’s hospital, which eventually housed the town’s only restaurant and therefore became its de facto meeting place, “is as much or more a fixture in this album and this family than the school, the factory, the library, the market, the taxi stand, the pawnshop, or any other institution.”

Throughout the book, Frazier shows her influences from Depression-era images, such as Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” (1936); Frazier has openly wondered what Florence Owens Thompson, Lange’s subject, might’ve said had she been invited to collaborate in documenting her family’s plight. Self-determination rarely figures in the social documentary tradition, and in many ways Frazier’s work seeks to change this. She defines her photography as a “conceptual documentary” practice speaks to her continued faith in the camera as a vehicle for both social change and aesthetic possibility: beauty, in her work, does not preclude protest any more than education presumes awareness.

https://latoyarubyfrazier.com/work/ – a link to LaToya’s website, with all her different pieces of work.

LaToya’s interview in “So Present So Visible”

This quote from the start of the article really stood out to me, as it describes LaToya’s artistic process which I think is really unique. It is useful for me, studying this photographer to understand her motivations for her project and her creative process behind her images. Understanding the reasons behind LaToya’s photography helps the viewer to understand the social context of her images, and the messages she is trying to show.

This quote from the interview speaks about the narrative and text in her book. I find the fact that she says: “the text functions as an image and the photograph becomes the visual language that creates a tension” very interesting. This is a perspective I haven’t thought of before and will be helpful when constructing my essay. The change of the text as an image and the image of text highlights the important of the social context in LaToya’s work. There are clues in the images, mostly not obvious that lead the reader to the context of the subject of her work – this links to the prejudice and media representation that Frazier talks about in the text of the book, and solidifies her points – “The text functions as an image and the photograph becomes the visual language that creates a tension.”

This quote is an important part of the interview. In this quote, LaToya speaks about the experiences of herself and people in her hometown of prejudice and racism towards their community. She speaks about how the media has portrayed her town and its residents – this has been extremely bias and negative, and through her work she sought to change this narrative: “counter this reality” – the reality presented by the media, and to “ultimately re – imagine and rewrite it myself.” This explains LaToya’s moral standpoint behind her images and the influence issues that affect her have had on her work.

This image is black and white, which creates stark contrast within the image. For example, in the middle of the image has a large amount of black tones. This creates a clear division between the two parts of the image. This could signify a dividing factor in the family which drives the two subjects apart, which could be why LaToya chose this composition. This black-toned area of the photo matches with the black of the t-shirt of the subject to the left, creating a link between these two areas of the photograph. This image clearly uses the rule of thirds which can be seen all parts of the image: in the left the start of the black doorframe, creating the first third, the whole of the black doorframe creating the centre third, and the rest of the image to the right creating the last third. The focal point in this image is the door, which creates a high amount of contrast with the different tones of the white towel. The two subjects looking away from each other and the lack of faces in the image draws further attention to the area of dark space in the middle of the image – The exclusion of faces and the body language of the two subjects could signify tension between the two characters orunsettled feelings. To me, there is a sense of thoughfulness and nostalgia in this image, helped by the presentation of the two subjects but also the aesthetic qualities of the image: the image was shot on film and in black and white which creates a more sentimental image of family to me.

Stratos Kalafatis

Kalafatis explores the idea of the Aegean Archipelago being a city unto itself. With Spyros documenting the human element, Kalafatis photographed the ships and routes, imbued with memories of his own personal acquaintance and family history. What really sticks out to me is how empty and lonely his images look, while they also show how beautiful islands/ the ocean can be.

How can I use this for influence?

Obviously Jersey is surrounded by the sea, and with so many scenic viewing points available 24/7 for shooting in various times of day there are infinite outcomes for coastal shoots. I also think that by focusing my project towards the coast/ sea I can attempt to portray the element of disconnection that comes with living in Jersey.

There are three island territories within the British Isles that are known as Crown Dependencies; these are the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey which make up Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man. The Crown Dependencies are not part of the United Kingdom, but are self-governing possessions of the British Crown.

In each Bailiwick The Queen’s personal representative is the Lieutenant Governor, who since the mid-eighteenth century has acted as the channel of communication between the Sovereign and the Channel Islands’ government.

The  two Crown Dependencies have their own legislative assemblies as well as their own administrative, fiscal and legal systems. They have wide powers of self-government, although primary legislation passed by the assemblies requires approval by The Queen in Council (Privy Council).

The Channel Islands were part of the Duchy of Normandy when Duke William, following his conquest of England in 1066, became William I.

In 1106, William’s youngest son Henry I seized the Duchy of Normandy from his brother Robert; since that time, the English and subsequently British Sovereign has held the title Duke of Normandy.

By 1205, England had lost most of its French lands, including Normandy. However, the Channel Islands, part of the lost Duchy, remained a self-governing possession of the English Crown.

While the islands today retain autonomy in government, they owe allegiance to The Queen in her role as Duke of Normandy.