“On The Making of Steel Genesis, Sandra Gould Ford” is the evocative, thought-provoking and beautiful collaborative creation of photo-essayist, MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow LaToya Ruby Frazier and author, artist, educator Sandra Gould Ford.

Steel Genesis represents a recent photographic movement toward subjective documentary storytelling. The combined use of first-person narrative text, poetry, historical artifacts, and photographic imagery representing Sandra Gould Ford’s first-hand experiences at the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company allows for a complex delivery of a story through varying narrator’s voices and stylistic conventions. This is increasingly complicated by the portraits of our primary narrator (Ford) by photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier. This combination strategy allows for a viewer to engage with material from both “insider” and “outsider” perspectives in the space of the same exhibition, and ultimately contemplate how their understanding of a story may be affected by different, but complementary narrative sources.– Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.