Family Ties

The steel industry was already collapsing by the time the photographer and visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier was born, in 1982. Like many Rust Belt communities, her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, has suffered both economic and environmental distress: Thousands of manufacturing jobs have vanished, but chemicals from the steel plants still pollute Braddock’s skies.

In The Notion of Family, a series she began as a teenager in 2001 and continued to work on for more than a decade, Frazier examines the physical and psychic toll wrought by industrial decay. The series presents more than simple snapshots of devastation. The Notion of Family is an intimate, intergenerational exploration of the care that Black women show one another as corporations and public safety nets falter. It is also intensely personal: Frazier photographed herself alongside her mother and grandmother, who helped guide her creative decisions. We see a young Frazier sitting on the living-room floor with her grandmother, surrounded by dolls and statuettes. In another photo, Frazier gazes into the mirror while her mother applies a chemical relaxer to her hair.

The images are some of her earliest works on view this spring in “Monuments of Solidarity,” the first major-museum survey of Frazier’s career, at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. In a body of work that now spans multiple decades, Frazier has continued bearing witness to postindustrial landscapes—and the people left navigating them. Her aim, she has written, is to resist, through everything she creates, the forces of “historical erasure and historical amnesia.”