LaToya Ruby Frazier and the Promise of Class Dynamism

This essay looks at photographer and advocate LaToya Ruby Frazier’s celebrated early photographs of the working-class Black community in which she grew up; and it critiques the tendency among some leftist thinkers to subvert “personal” matters (of race, gender, etc.) to narrowly political-economic abstractions. In their 2018 essay, “Chris Killip and LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Promise of a Class Aesthetic: Chris Killip,” critic Walter Benn Michaels and sociologist Daniel Zamora argue that it is “the idea—the concept—of class” that “survives” and “matters” in Frazier’s work, over and above “the distinctive pathos”—or subjective identities and lived experiences—of the individuals represented. Borrowing from Michael A. McCarthy and Mathieu Hikaru Desan’s work on “class dynamism,” this essay demonstrates how Frazier mobilizes the personal in ways that are not only foreclosed by Benn Michaels and Zamora’s analysis but that ultimately reflect a more promising approach to class politics.