LATOYA RUBY – THE NOTION OF FAMILY
2017-09-11Frazier’s images explore the painful effects of decades of industrial decline, poverty, and systemic racism in her hometown of Braddock, PA. A working class town situated on the bank of the Monongahela River, Braddock’s economy had been rooted in industry since Andrew Carnegie built the Edgar Thomson Steel Works in 1873. A child of the 80s and 90s, Frazier grew up when most of the steel industry had left the region and the War on Drugs decimated her community. Frazier came to use photography and art as a way to question inequality and reclaim history.
The Notion of Family elegantly shifts from images steeped in the humanist documentary traditions of artists like Gordon Parks and Walker Evans, to the conceptual and activist practices of artists like Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula. Frazier’s photographs artfully chronicle life in Braddock for over a decade, capturing its historic industrial beauty and its deterioration, such as with her elegiac images of the closure and destruction of the UPMC Braddock Hospital, the town’s largest employer at the time.
Exhibition runs from September 21st through to November 18th, 2017
Silver Eye Center for Photography
477 Melwood Avenue
Pittsburgh
15213 PA
