The metal business was already collapsing by the point the photographer and visible artist LaToya Ruby Frazier was born, in 1982. Like many Rust Belt communities, her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, has suffered each financial and environmental misery: Hundreds of producing jobs have vanished, however chemical compounds from the metal vegetation nonetheless pollute Braddock’s skies.
In The Notion of Household, a sequence she started as a youngster in 2001 and continued to work on for greater than a decade, Frazier examines the bodily and psychic toll wrought by industrial decay. The sequence presents greater than easy snapshots of devastation. The Notion of Household is an intimate, intergenerational exploration of the care that Black girls present each other as firms and public security nets falter. It is usually intensely private: Frazier photographed herself alongside her mom and grandmother, who helped information her artistic selections. We see a younger Frazier sitting on the living-room flooring together with her grandmother, surrounded by dolls and statuettes. In one other photograph, Frazier gazes into the mirror whereas her mom applies a chemical relaxer to her hair.
The photographs are a few of her earliest works on view this spring in “Monuments of Solidarity,” the primary major-museum survey of Frazier’s profession, at New York Metropolis’s Museum of Fashionable Artwork. In a physique of labor that now spans a number of a long time, Frazier has continued bearing witness to postindustrial landscapes—and the folks left navigating them. Her intention, she has written, is to withstand, by way of all the things she creates, the forces of “historic erasure and historic amnesia.”
