Higher Pictures announces a two-person exhibition of Sebrina Fassbender and LaToya Ruby Frazier. Fassbender will exhibit photographs from a five-year exploration of transient women in the ‘old’ East Village in New York City. Frazier will exhibit a selection of self-portraits from 2005-2009. The exhibition will run from May 14th through June 20th, 2009.

Sebrina Fassbender (b. 1977) grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. Early on, she fell in love with Andy Warhol and David LaChapelle, then later became influenced and inspired by Diane Arbus, Donna Ferrato and Guy Bourdin. Her portraits have the humanity, grace and color of a young Robert Bergman. A formally trained photographer, Fassbender’s portraits are the result of an intimacy between subject and artist. For this series, Fassbender spent five years seeking out women who existed within a raw, emotionally sexualized and chaotic space. Responding deeply to the fantasy, unbearable pain and sadness of these women, Fassbender creates her portraits by dressing and posing them in order to make the women more real than the reality of the women themselves.

LaToya Ruby Frazier (b. 1982) grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Frazier uses her art to explore her relationship with her family, similar to artists Doug Dubois and Leigh Ledare. The content, style and immediacy of her work leads the viewer to assume she is documenting from the outside. In reality, Frazier is very much in front of the lens exposing her family and herself. Her photography is unlike that of Eugene Richards in that she is not an editorial photographer, but rather, Frazier is the content and photographer, allowing her mother to frame and shoot her as the subject. Her work is autobiographical and blurs the line between self-portraiture and social documentary. Through her intentionally aesthetic black and white photographs, Frazier’s honest and relentless approach intensely explores a psychological intergenerational lineage through the 1920s, 1950s and 1980s.

LaToya Ruby Frazier will be an artist in residence at Art Omi in 2009, and has been an artist in residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in 2008 and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. Her works have been exhibited at the National Academy Museum, The New Museum, NY, Rush Arts Gallery and Schroeder Romero Gallery, NY. She is part of the upcoming AIM exhibition at the Bronx Museum.