In a 2024 video from the Museum of Modern Art’s ArtSpeaks program, artist and activist LaToya Ruby Frazier talks about two works from Lee Friedlander’s Ohio Factory Valley series, part of the museum’s collection. For Frazier, the photographs of Black women at work recall an era before factory jobs became rare, and serve as a record of American history. “They both take me back to what it felt like being a little girl looking at other working Black Americans in the eighties,” she notes. Frazier describes Friedlander’s influence on her own practice, which uses photography as a visual storytelling and social-justice device.