LaToya Ruby Frazier's Empathetic Lens
Two decades after she first photographed her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier's work is still pushing back against historical erasure and historical amnesia in working-class communities.
Last month, when the exhibition LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it prompted me to think about when I first encountered Frazier’s photography. It must have been around 2012 or so, when she was featured in that year’s Whitney Biennial. I remember feeling both shocked and exhilarated. I couldn’t believe that someone from Braddock, an old mill town less than five miles away from my own home, was making such thoughtful, self-aware, and consequential work. Not because it couldn’t happen, of course, but because, at the time, the only work being made about Braddock was being done by outsiders: traveling photographers making ruin-porn inflected pictures, advertising executives from Levi’s looking to use the town as a backdrop for their Walt Whitman-inspired ‘Go Forth’ campaign, and news outlets looking to document the political rise of John Fetterman, who was halfway through his tenure as mayor at the time.
Other than the work of independent filmmaker Tony Buba, who has spent more than four decades chronicling Braddock—documenting the dissolution of the working class after the boom years of the early 20th century—honest and personal depictions of what it meant to be born and raised in Braddock did not exist. Especially not the experience of what it meant to come of age as a Black woman in a community with no jobs, no economy, and catastrophic population loss. Until Frazier willed her story into being, that is.
In her essay in the opening pages of the exhibition catalogue for Monuments of Solidarity, the Braddock-born, Chicago-based artist-activist wastes no time in reminding us about the significance of where she is from and how it has guided her work these last two decades:
In 1982 I was born by the ancient Monongahela River in Talbot Towers, an Allegheny County public housing project in a neighborhood known as “the Bottom” in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Shaped by the steel industry and the legacy of the nineteenth-century industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, it is home to his first steel mill, the Edgar Thomson Steel Works (1875), and his first library, the Braddock Carnegie Library (1889).
To imagine Frazier’s photographs without envisioning the postindustrial expanse of Braddock is nearly impossible. It is, after all, the catalyst for all of her work that has followed. In The Notion of Family, Frazier’s seminal monograph published by Aperture in 2014, Braddock is as much a character as her mother, Cynthia, or her grandmother Ruby. Some might even argue that the town is more of a character than those in her family, if for no other reason than Braddock’s looming, pervasive, and inescapable presence in each image. Which is why Frazier’s raw and honest account of her family’s life in the shadow of the Edgar Thompson Steel Works is so moving. It places, side by side, sweet and intimate pictures of domestic life—often interior moments inside the family home—alongside exterior pictures of an economically devastated town weathering the fallout of deindustrialization.
As Frazier continues in her introductory essay from Monuments of Solidarity, she reiterates the humanistic approach that has been evident in so much of her work—how the empathetic lens of her camera has provided a North Star:
From the Steel Valley, along the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio rivers to the Flint River in “Vehicle City,” Flint, Michigan; from historical mineshafts in the Borinage, Belgium, to a historic labor union in Lordstown, Ohio; and from community health workers in Baltimore, Maryland, to a labor leader and civil rights activist in California’s Central Valley, I’ve used my camera as a compass to direct a pathway toward the illuminated truth of the indomitable spirit of working-class families and communities in the twenty-first century.
As I read Monuments of Solidarity, which I’m still working my way through—I hope to see the exhibition in person before its closes on September 7—the following passage from Frazier’s essay struck me because of its practical honesty:
For this reason, it is incumbent upon me to resist—one photograph at a time, one photo-essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time—historical erasure and historical amnesia.
Erasure and amnesia are so ingrained in our histories—whether personal or familial, local or national—that it is easy to assume your given generation is the first to experience or truly understand hardship or loss or injustice. But maybe that is Frazier’s point. For history to become more than memory, creating an honest record of our lives—whether it’s through photography, writing, oral history, etc.—is the best we can do.
