In mini-docu style, editor and producer, Tim McLaughlin, connects his video footage with LaToya’s photographs by filming on location in Braddock, Pennsylvania. LaToya’s photographs are rooted in a sense of place, and McLaughlin felt the town was as much of a character in her work as her family.

LaToya Ruby Frazier ’s body of work “The Notion Of Family” examines the impact of the steel industry and health care system on the community of Braddock, PA. See the project at http://mediastorm.com/clients/2015-icp-infinity-awards-publication-latoya-ruby-frazier

[The Aperture Foundation] sat down with LaToya Ruby Frazier to discuss the realization of her first book, The Notion Of Family, which offers an incisive exploration of the legacy of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied by her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania.

Twelve years in the making, the work compellingly sets her story of three generations—her Grandma Ruby, her mother, and herself—against larger questions of civic belonging and responsibility. Since beginning the work as a teenager, Frazier has enlisted the participation of her family—and her mother in particular. These images acknowledge and expand upon the traditions of classic black-and-white documentary photography, and are themselves transformative acts, resetting traditional power dynamics and narratives, both those of her family and those of the community at large.

“The Notion Of Family” by LaToya Ruby Frazier is available for purchase here: bit.ly/1kfpabj

LaToya Ruby Frazier at The American Academy in Berlin
Guna S. Mundheim Artist Talk, March 4, 2014
©2014 The American Academy

Framework: Activism, Memory and the Social Landscape
The abandonment of suburban industrial towns by local and state governments has not been visually documented or accurately covered by the American mass media. With the rise of the “creative class” or “urban pioneers” pitted against the displaced working class, much human suffering experienced by the newly dislocated is overlooked. For over a decade, LaToya Ruby Frazier has been documenting, through photography and video, the collapse of the steel mill industry, environmental negligence, and deindustrialization that has affected her family and community in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a thirteen-block industrial town in the eastern region of Allegheny County. In this lecture, Frazier discussed her work, the importance of documentary photography today, and focused particularly on the intersection of documentary art that represents invisible realities and the importance of cultural memory found in the industrial heritage of towns such as Braddock, Pennsylvania and Eisenhüttenstadt in East Germany.