 Hi, my name is LaToya Reggie Frazier and I'm an artist. I work and live in Chicago and the U.S. these days. My work is primarily based in photography. I work often in photography, video, text, and a lot of storytelling with the people that appear in all of my work. My practice is actually rooted in the aesthetics of the 1930s social documentary work, but conceptually it's also rooted in a discourse and a photographic practice based on artists from the 60s and 70s who talk about the social and political in everyday life. And so currently on view here at the Moudang are three bodies of work. The first body of work which took 14 years to make that I'm known for is called the notion of family. That was work that I produced and created with my grandmother and my mother in our hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. And it's a story about three generations of black women living in a post-industrial landscape and what that means. The second body of work is a work that I produced in the Bournage in Belgium and in English it's called, and from the cold tips, a tree will rise. And that's a collaboration body work done with coal miners and their families in the Bournage region. That really looks at the history and the culture of the landscape and how their own hands really did their work and labor form the actual landscapes in the mountain sides of the tree sides that we see that are actually coal tips permeating that landscape. And so working with the miners to record their memories and for the first time transcribing where I wrote their memories by self and cursive in French sharing those memories with their own family members for the very first time was very important for that archive in that series. And the third body of work which is a more recent produced body of work is called on the making of Still Genesis which was done collaboratively with Sandra Goldford who is what I referred to as a Renaissance woman that was overlooked in the city of Pittsburgh. She is a very important artist and writer and photographer herself and I wanted to honor her life and bring her to visibility. A part of my practice, the way that I go about making collaborative portraits and story telling with people is that I'll arrive to their home and I'll speak with them for hours. So I don't have my camera or my equipment out. I simply sit at the table rather than we have coffee or a meal and we talk to each other and actually get to find an actual familiarity and a human connection between each other. And these conversations can last anywhere from two to eight to ten hours. And they often end up lasting anywhere between like four to ten hours depending on the person. You know, what's beautiful about just being a citizen and a human being in the world is you can literally talk to a stranger and immediately the stranger fades away because you've found each other's humanity. And so that's a really important part of the process and until I do that I don't bring out the camera. And it's through empathically listening to them and connecting with them on a human level and a spiritual level that I'm able to then render their humanity and their presence.