LaToya Ruby Frazier: Documenting Braddock's Decline and Family Memory

LaToya Ruby Frazier, born 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania, is a protest artist whose work in photography, video, performance, and agitprop tracts revives the forgotten world of her ruined former mining town. Her series "The Notion of Family" spans nine years of black-and-white images capturing her family's intimate struggles—her grandmother's chronic illness, her mother's cancer, and her own lupus—paralleling the town's decay from unemployment, crack epidemic, and hospital closure. Frazier critiques Levi's "Go Forth" campaign and Mayor John Fetterman's revitalization plans as hollow, staging a performance where she shreds jeans outside a Levi's store. She creates photolithographs demanding the community hospital's reopening. After studying graphic design at Edinboro University, she was mentored by photographer Kathe Kowalski, who taught her the documentary's iconic value. Frazier archives erased histories, as her family had no photo albums and town archives omitted Black residents. Her aesthetic, austere and silent like Bernd and Hilla Becher's industrial views, evokes Dorothea Lange's social documentary but reverses the power dynamic: her mother and grandmother choose camera angles, making portraits self-portraits. Frazier exhibited at the 2009 New Museum Triennial, 2010 Greater New York at MoMA PS1, 2011 Incheon Women Artists' Biennale, 2012 Whitney Biennial, and 2012 Americans in New York 2 at Galerie Michel Rein, Paris. She lives in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and New York.