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Working Families
John Haberin New York City
LaToya Ruby Frazier
From the very start, LaToya Ruby Frazier stepped outside the New York art scene. As a young artist, she returned to her family home in the Rust Belt. She photographed herself as one of three generations of women, as she puts it, "unified by illness" but the illness extends poignantly to race, gender, and poverty in America.
For Frazier, the decline of the Rust Belt can only be a family affair. Born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, where Andrew Carnegie opened his first steel mill, she knows the people it employed, the jobs lost, and the desolation it brought to water, land, and air. Her mother had life-saving surgery at Braddock Hospital and still shows its scars. Her grandmother spent her failing days there, looking ever so much smaller than her pathetic hospital bed. Frazier photographed both encounters with life and death for The Notion of Family, at the Brooklyn Museum in 2013, 
the series that occupied the first fourteen years of her adult life. And she still calls Braddock home.
Yet her notion of family has changed. More than ten years later, it extends to an entire city seen from above, where family and loss are only implicit but no less real. It extends, too, to other places where workers fight for their jobs and their very lives. She wants to give every loss a face and every face a voice, and photography itself has given way to photo essays, with personal accounts twice over, in images and text. She calls her midcareer retrospective "Monuments of Solidarity," and it ends at the Museum of Art with words alone. Could, though, monuments overwhelm the artistry and solidarity the individual?
A fatal unity
LaToya Ruby Frazier may speak of family as unified by illness, but that kind of unity cannot last forever, and it does not come cheap. When she shares a bed with her grandmother, the latter could well be looking for an exit, and in the sad course of things she finds one. When the young woman poses with her mother, she plays hide and seek behind her, as if a mother's dignity has put her to shame. (Do not even ask about her t-shirt from the Bill Cosby show.) In the sole photograph of three generations together, the mother looks trapped in the middle distance, and the grandmother has an open coffin. When Frazier remembers them all alive, it is as their photographs on a night table, surrounded by an ashtray, a hairbrush, and eyeglasses, with no assurance that anyone will use them again.
No one here speaks, not even to act out old quarrels. A recliner sits empty, and stuffed toys pack a fireplace with their lifelessness. When Frazier's mother faces cancer at her bravest, she leans over a sink, her face mostly buried under an arm. On her bed, Blue Cross literally provides the only blanket. When Frazier herself looks her most stylish, at age thirty-one, it is to boast of living with lupus. This is illness as performance, although a dark one, with a young woman's confidence tempered by an older woman's weariness and a still older woman's death.
The family's fatal unity extends to Braddock, and so do the forty photographs and frank, extended captions in "A Haunted Capital." Frazier returned to the former steel town in 2002 to begin The Notion of Family, and one might wonder if she has ever escaped. Since then, the population has shrunk by some ninety percent, and the largest remaining employer, the hospital, has closed. From across an empty lot, it looks less abandoned than bombed out, and the cigar butts in another photograph could pass for the debris. The wires from the rigid blackness of utility poles cast their horizontal shadows across burned-out windows. In this town, graffiti, too, is reduced to silhouettes.
Frazier appeared in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and, two years before, among the emerging artists in "Greater New York." She was also in "Lush Life," a 2010 summer show spanning Lower East Side galleries and named for Richard Price's 2008 novel of indulgence and excess. For an online video accompanying the Brooklyn exhibition, in conjunction with Liz Magic Laser and Art21's series "New York Close Up," she executes a slow shuffle, butt down on a Soho sidewalk. She chose the location, though, for a Levi's store, party scene, and "photo workshop." Levi's has used Braddock as the setting for an ad campaign, as the "new frontier." There "everyone's work is equally important," including the work of a black man holding a child.
Frazier's grandmother looks happiest with her far colder "babies"—mere plastic dolls. And Frazier finds little life outside her mother's home, beyond a protestor against the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which shuttered the hospital in 2010. At a tavern, a decidedly unfeeling woman stares back from behind the long bar. A dark, heavy cabinet or partition separates Frazier from her mother's boyfriend, known achingly as Mr. Art, and the mother stands with her back to a post and to the closed hospital just across the street. A family friend, his back to the camera, is isolated from both the viewer and his own weary face in the mirror. Barriers here multiply, whether to employment, health, humanity, or life.
The choice of black and white photography underscores not just bleakness or a moral gravity out of Walker Evans, but the experience everywhere of divisions and contrasts. Not that they line up quite so simply with proud terms like gender and race. Frazier's very anger stems from family, rootedness, and love, but that does not necessarily translate into optimism. Even a cheeseburger, in close-up, looks at once threatening and lost. A harsh stove light illuminates an old kettle, outnumbered by cans of oven cleaner. The recent past here sticks to everyone, and it will not be easy to clean away.
Family and solidarity
When White Columns presented "Monuments for the USA" some years ago, one had to expect an uneasy mix of patriotism and irony, and the group show delivered both. LaToya Ruby Frazier is interested in neither one. She accommodates many narratives and takes everything seriously. What begins as the story of black women united in illnesses becomes first a town's sickness and then a wider family. Auto workers in Ohio in 2019 include men and women, black and white, and their testimonies as well. Just past the show's exit, Frazier sings "Solidarity Forever," the union anthem, to her own accompaniment on guitar.
This is not just about her. When Frazier began, family placed her among three generations, and their resilience stopped well short of boasting. In photos alongside her mother, they seem to share one set of eyes and lips. Yet shadows divide them, and her grandmother's refuse, including a Pall Mall carton, litters the carpet. She was not yet thirty when she appeared in "Greater New York" in 2010 and, as the family's youngest, still coming to be. Yet her sense of home was already what other black artists have called an American Cypher.
Things looked different, though, from the moment she looked out and up. She could see the hospital n ruins and the view from a helicopter of a polluted river. She could see the town's welcoming sign sponsored by a pest-control company and those ads for Levis that took blue jeans and Braddock as the real America. If, as the ads read, everybody's work is equally important, where are the black and women's faces? And of course her video in collaboration with Magic Laser asks just that. It was time to head elsewhere.
In Flint Is Family, ending in 2020, families cling to their uncertain supplies of fresh water, and a mother and child leave for Mississippi. They might have needed the health-care workers in More Than Conquerors, ending in 2022, which adds the last missing elements, photo essays. Workers pose for a picture and supply plenty of words, more than anyone is likely to read. Mounted on large steel frames, they become an installation. The health-care workers, in Baltimore, speak of inequality in opportunity for them and access to care for others. The auto workers in Ohio lament the last Chevy Cruze and what it means for them. They identify so much with their work that a worker crawls under the very last car to record its serial number.
The workers resist to the last, through their union, and Frazier shares their desperate optimism. She lays out the frames from Ohio in one long row, painted an industrial red, like an auto body run wild. "It is incumbent upon me to resist," she says, "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." It is getting harder, though, and the show ends with A Pilgrimage to Dolores Huerta, a migrant labor camp. The artist's geography has left family and steel far behind. If you sense a collision in priorities between environmental degradation and job loss, Frazier is testifying to needs, not to a policy agenda.
The words of others are also her answer to the weight of the monumental. True, she is less and less vulnerable and closer and closer to a lecture, but "all I'm doing," she says, "is showing up as a vessel." On the Making of Steel in 2017 collaborated in its photography as well. Sandra Gould Ford, a steel worker who was losing her own job, takes up the camera. The curators, Roxana Marcoci wth Caitlin Ryan and Antoinette D. Roberts, give it an oval room under changing red light, to simulate the night sky that still overlooks it all. The overflow of words and the accompanying portraits, little more than selfies, are deadening nonetheless. Frazier has come a long way from the poignancy of the young photographer's art, her stories, her family, and her illness.
LaToya Ruby Frazier ran at the Brooklyn Museum through August 11, 2013, and The Museum of Modern Art through September 7, 2024.