In her photographic, video, and performance work, LaToya Ruby Frazier (Born 1982 in Braddock, PA) addresses issues that range from the personal to the political. Over the course of the last decade, Frazier’s practice has focused on the social, economic, and environmental deterioration of her hometown of Braddock, PA, experienced through the tangible and psychological effects on her immediate family.

Mom Making an Image of Me is part of a 2008 series of double portraits of the artist and her mother posing in the family house in Braddock. Throughout the series, the artist provides minimal visual context—a metal heater or patterned curtains—to give a sense of the domestic space. Both Frazier and her mother are visible only in the mirror propped on the radiator. Between the two women stands the camera, a key third element in this triangulation. Just as Frazier and her mother are framed by the mirror, the image is framed by the room. Through her precise compositions and focus on the individual as well as family, Frazier visualizes complex relationships.

Through photography, video, and performance, LaToya Ruby Frazier (Born 1982 in Braddock, PA) addresses a wide range of topics that concern her—from access to healthcare and the effects of deindustrialization to her family history. Combining social documentary modes with portraiture, Frazier creates penetrating views of everyday life. Over the course of the last decade, her practice has focused on the social, economic, and environmental deterioration of her hometown of Braddock, PA, experienced through the concrete and psychological effects on her immediate family.

Huxtables, Mom, and Me is part of a series of portraits featuring the artist and her mother posing in the latter’s house in Braddock. As in another work by the artist in the collection, Mom Making an Image of Me, Frazier here uses mirrors to create frames within frames, generating spatially disorienting compositions that implicitly involve the viewer. Frazier dominates the image, but her mother, wearing military fatigues, is reflected beside her in a mirror propped against the wall: through staging, the two women stand side by side despite their actual confrontation and separation in space. The artist frequently includes African-American cultural references; in this image she wears a T-shirt depicting the actors in The Cosby Show. Through her precise compositions and focus on the individual as well as the family, Frazier visualizes complex relationships with metaphorical implications.

To explore the relationship between verbal language and photography, Shannon Ebner (Born 1971 in Englewood, NJ) literally builds letters, words, and phrases from sundry materials and then sites and photographs them. She constructs imagery using language that is itself constructed.

In Yes Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, the words are barely visible, traced in a haze of stray black paint that floats in front of the picture plane and obscures the depiction of a green and golden hill. This threshold of visibility in the photographic image mirrors the uncertainty imbued in the phrase’s oscillation of “yes” and “no.” Through such careful interposition of text and image, Ebner’s work reminds us how profoundly imbricated vision is with the material substance of things, and how much meaning depends on the context of encounter.

Shannon Ebner (Born 1971 in Englewood, NJ) mines the correlations between language and photography. Drawing on a wide range of texts—from poetry and experimental writing to Indian sign language and political speech—she builds letters and phrases out of vernacular materials such as cardboard and cinder blocks, and then photographs the results. Set up in either her studio or outdoors, these impermanent arrangements call attention to the variant ways in which meaning is constructed.

In The Day–Sob–Dies, Ebner has assembled the titular phrase in a lilting, cursive script and then suspended it between two thin sticks in an overgrown field at the outskirts of Los Angeles. The “Sob” positioned between dashes might mean the intrusion of an outburst in the phrase, but it could also be read as the acronym for “son of a bitch.” As with most of Ebner’s texts, the exact meaning is cryptic but clearly full of significance, especially with the phrase, alluding to the margin between life and death, situated in what appears to be the scrubby outskirts of a city.

Rineke Dijkstra (Born 1959 in Sittard, Netherlands) is best known for her striking and intimate portraits and videos of young people. Shooting her subjects frontally, she often presents individuals in moments of transition—women after childbirth, newly displaced child refugees, and young military recruits—and focuses on the evocativeness of the subject’s expression, pose, or gesture.

Dijkstra began the series of which this work forms a part during a residency at the German Academic Exchanges Service’s (DAAD) Artists-in-Residence program. For the series, the artist photographed adolescents in Tiergarten, one of the most popular parks in Berlin, as well as in a park in Lithuania. Tiergarten, Berlin, August 13, 2000 exemplifies the tenuous biographical moments Dijkstra is celebrated for capturing. The boy seems apprehensive: his shoulders are raised and he gazes sideways at something outside the frame. The artist works with a large-format camera, which requires a long exposure during which her sitters must maintain their pose, which may explain to a degree the subject’s awkward stance. By titling the work with the name of the locale rather than the boy, Dijkstra shifts attention away from his individuality, locating his experience, like that of so many his age, in the unsettling moment somewhere between the knowable present and the unpredictable future.

Liz Deschenes (Born 1966 in Boston) is known for lushly beautiful and meditative work in photography and sculpture that probes the relationship between the mechanics of seeing, image-making processes, and modes of display. She employs various photographic technologies to explore the symbolic power of color and creates sculptural installations that respond to a site’s unique features.

Green screens are commonly used as backdrops in television, film, and video game production to introduce special effects. They are typically invisible to viewers, but in Green Screen #4 Deschenes makes them both subject and object. A 15-foot-long monochrome photograph mounted on Duratrans, a material used for commercial photography displays, Green Screen #4 is a stand-in for the thing it depicts.

The drawings and paintings of Latvian-born, Indianapolis-based Vija Celmins (Born 1938 in Riga, Latvia) are meticulous copies of photographs she has made. Her labor-intensive technique results in highly detailed photorealistic drawings of natural subjects such as the sea, desert, and constellations. Initially, Celmins began working in this exhaustive, repetitive manner as a way “to get to some other place that was a little more primitive, maybe more old-fashioned, without really thinking.”

Concentric Bearings D brings together on a single sheet of paper three images made from separate plates. On the left is a mezzotint of a falling plane, a recurring motif in Celmins’s work. The soft gray of the print as well as the surface scratches recall the material qualities of the original photograph. In the center is an aquatint of a night sky. The third print is a photogravure Celmins made from a photograph of Marcel Duchamp’s kinetic sculpture Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics). Taken together, the images encapsulate the range of subject matter and techniques found in Celmins’s oeuvre. Each of them marks a moment of arrested movement—of a plane, the night sky, and a kinetic sculpture. Through Celmins’s intensive process, she brings the subjects “back to life by putting them in a real space that you confront.”

Concentric Bearings D introduces into the ICA/Boston collection an artist who offers an important precedent for younger artists engaged with the history and use of photography, such as Thomas Ruff and Sara VanDerBeek, both represented in the collection. It also complements a recently acquired suite of prints by Tacita Dean that features found historical photographs.

Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra’s (Born 1959 in Sittard, Netherlands) work presents a contemporary take on the portrait. The temporality of photography is essential in Dijkstra’s work. The artist sensitively captures her subjects in states of significant transition: adolescents on the beach, newly enlisted young adults, and mothers with their newborns or infants. A photograph presents a past moment, and Dijkstra’s portraits lie at the threshold of activity, either before or after an event transpires. The setting is typically devoid of extraneous details, highlighting only the evocative nature of the subject’s facial and bodily expressions.

Dubrovnik, Croatia, July 13, 1996 is part of a series of twenty portraits that document the innocence and awkwardness of adolescence. Taken across Europe and the East Coast of the United States, the images are titled with location and date without reference to the subject’s name. Dubrovnik, Croatia, July 13, 1996 depicts two young boys, presumably brothers, wearing seemingly indistinguishable bathing suits. Beyond slight differences in the way the boys hold their arms, their stances are nearly identical. This image draws upon the rich tradition of images of bathers in art history.