LaToya Ruby Frazier Is Paying It Forward
New York Times
by Siddhartha Mitter
Reporting from Braddock and Pittsburgh, Pa.
She may be America’s foremost social documentary photographer, now with a survey at the Museum of Modern Art. “All I’m doing is showing up as a vessel.”
The photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier creating a self-portrait in Braddock, Pa., her hometown, at the site of a footbridge over the railroad. The bridge had been torn down, but she decided to make the portrait anyway. Photo credit: Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York Times
A continuous high-pitched din — a bit whirring, a bit crunching — echoed over the Bottom, the residential sliver of Braddock, Pa., nearest to the industrial plants and the Monongahela River. It rose, indistinguishably, from the steel mill — the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, opened by Andrew Carnegie in 1875 and still operating — and the adjacent air separation plant, where gasses are piped into the mill or liquefied for shipment.
Also borne on the breeze was an unmissable acrid smell. It hung in the atmosphere on a Monday morning in April, over Washington Street. Not much was going on: Braddock, near Pittsburgh, had more than 20,000 inhabitants a century ago but now has fewer than 2,000. Still, some young people — Black, like four-fifths of the residents today — clustered around the Living Water Church, where a hearse parked outside indicated that a funeral was underway.
As I walked with the photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier — who grew up on Washington Street and made there the documentary work about her family, at once poetic and unflinching, that cemented her reputation — my nose and throat started to tingle.
“Oh yeah,” Frazier said. “The longer you’re here, the heavier it’s going to get.”
Braddock has a history of high levels of air pollution and respiratory disorders, as well as infant mortality. Pollution from the steel mill remains a public health concern: In 2022, U.S. Steel, which owns the plant, agreed to a $1.5 million fine and promised improvements in a settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency and county health authorities.
Frazier has the autoimmune disease lupus. “I shouldn’t be down here too long, because my health has been so adversely affected,” she said.
The smell thickened as we neared the factories. The gas plant occupies the site of Talbot Towers, the public housing complex where Frazier’s family lived when she was born, in 1982, and that was torn down in 1990. Across the street sits the brick husk of another church, where she attended Bible study. An inscription on its facade — “You must be born again! Of water and spirit” — has appeared in her photographs.
“It’s almost like an out-of-body experience, right?” Frazier said over the noise, as brightly painted coal tipper trucks turned into the factory gates.
“But this is what I felt and knew as a kid. I always had a feeling as a little girl that there were two realms. The physical realm — yes, we’re on Washington Street, walking toward the steel mill — but then there was the spiritual realm. That these spiritual forces were always surrounding me — just like the history.”
Frazier’s “Edgar Thomson Plant and The Bottom,” from the project “A Despoliation of Water: From the Housatonic to the Monongahela River (1930-2013).” Frazier used a helicopter to make images that conveyed the impact of industry in the landscape. via LaToya Ruby Frazier and Gladstone gallery
This weekend, Frazier’s survey exhibition, titled “Monuments of Solidarity,” opens at the Museum of Modern Art. At 42, she may be America’s foremost social documentary photographer now. Her work charts the experience of working-class people around the country as they face compounding challenges of deindustrialization, environmental degradation and inequality. Through it all, her hometown Braddock remains her best template for understanding the world.
She first made her mark with “The Notion of Family” (2001-14). It portrayed over many years her grandmother Ruby, who raised her; her step-great-grandfather, known as Gramps; and her mother, Cynthia, notably in jointly composed mother-daughter portraits. Autobiographical and interior, the work gradually opened to Braddock’s battered terrain and the local activists resisting its decline. It earned Frazier inclusion in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2015.
“Grandma Ruby and Me,” from the series “The Notion of Family,” 2005, which established Frazier as a photographer and will be part of her survey at the Museum of Modern Art. via LaToya Ruby Frazier and Gladstone gallery
After that, she widened her field. In “Flint Is Family” (2016-20), she chronicled over years how some residents of Flint, Mich., coped with the water crisis that began in 2014 when authorities switched the public supply to the polluted Flint River. It has yet to be resolved.
In 2019, she spent nine months with members of the United Auto Workers in Lordstown, Ohio, after General Motors abruptly announced the closure of its plant there. Her project, which began as a commission for The New York Times Magazine, expanded into “The Last Cruze,” an installation of photographs, video and text interviews of some 60 workers — diverse by race, gender and age — that premiered at the Renaissance Society in Chicago.
And during the pandemic, she spent weeks in Baltimore photographing Black and working-class community health workers who deployed in the city to connect a vulnerable population to medical and support services. “More Than Conquerors,” featuring dozens of these workers and in some cases their families, received the top prize in the Carnegie International exhibition in 2022.
Installation view of “LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity,” at MoMA, recalls an automobile assembly line. Photo by Jonathan Dorado
Gathering these and other projects, the MoMA survey traces, for the first time in one place, Frazier’s journey toward this kind of civic polyphony. Her portraits of individuals or groups are collaboratively posed in homes, parks and workplaces. Accompanying them are extensive interviews that she conducts herself and excerpts, often at length, in her photo books and exhibition displays.
She opens space, as well, for grass-roots artists. In Flint, two poets, Amber Hasan and Shea Cobb, became her confidants and local entree. In a video Cobb, a school bus driver by day, delivers a forceful poem, then narrates Frazier’s images. In Lordstown, Kasey King, an auto worker and U.A.W. photographer, shot inside the plant — where Frazier was denied access — as the last Chevrolet Cruze moved through production. The slide show of those often emotional images, with King narrating, runs nearly one hour.
Frazier’s subject matter locates her in the engagé tradition that includes Lewis Hine, who photographed notably in Pittsburgh in the early 20th century; Dorothea Lange; Walker Evans; or one of her great inspirations, Gordon Parks. But her methods expand this canon, said Roxana Marcoci, the MoMA senior curator who organized “Monuments of Solidarity” with Caitlin Ryan, an assistant curator, and Antoinette D. Roberts, a curatorial assistant.
“Like Parks, she sees the camera lens as a radical tool for resistance,” Marcoci said. But by “centering on the act of looking after and listening to the people whom she is representing in her work,” Marcoci added, Frazier’s projects invite viewers to think alongside them, rather than regard them as subjects.
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