LaToya Ruby Frazier

Located in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh, Braddock, Pennsylvania, was a thriving American industrial town during the middle of the twentieth century; today, fifty years later, it is a virtual wasteland, with a population of merely 2,159 people. Its landscape was so thoroughly decimated by the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s and the subsequent crack-cocaine epidemic in the 1980s that in 2009, it was used as the setting for the post apocalyptic film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The middle class has fled to more prosperous suburbs, and all that remains are the poor. Once Braddock stopped producing, power shifted elsewhere.

LaToya Ruby Frazier is a third-generation resident of Braddock. In her work, which encompasses black-and-white photography, video, and performance, she bears witness to the state of her hometown. Set against the backdrop of the declining city, she takes portraits of herself, her mother, and grandmother (now deceased). All three suffered from lifelong illnesses; their bodies are also a timeline of deterioration. Frazier's achingly personal documentary photographs fall in the visual lineage of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Francesca Woodman, and even Gordon Matta-Clark, whose explorations of vandalized Bronx housing projects in the 1970s brought to light the failure of the utopian public housing system to provide better lives for the urban poor. In Matta-Clark’s work, there is a sense that the American dream is fraying on the edges; in Frazier’s, it has long since departed.

As part of "Empire State", Frazier presents her 2011 photographic series "Gray Area", which documents the demolition of the Braddock Hospital by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), a health-care corporation. The destruction in Braddock coincides with the opening of a $250 million hospital by the UPMC in the neighboring city of Monroeville. While the new hospital will be accessible to all, the corporation does not acknowledge the loss of jobs in an already-depressed Braddock, or the difficulty residents will have traveling to the new facilities. The justification for the new hospital required a willful moral equivocation; hence, the title of the series. Frazier’s photographs themselves bear striking resemblance to those taken by Otto Donath (among many anonymous image makers) after Berlin was bombed at the end of World War II. In the center of once-quaint Braddock there is a terrifying and vast mountain of rubble; around it lies mostly desolate streets. The devastation is erased in an outlier image from the series, Houston & Lafayette NYC, 2010, which features a billboard advertisement for Levi’s jeans mounted above one of New York’s busiest intersections. The ad is part of a 2010 campaign shot in Braddock, which ridiculously romanticized the "average blue-collar American worker". Juxtaposed with images of the destroyed hospital, it becomes clear how effectively eradicated the real story of Braddock has been from public discourse. Frazier’s work seeks to restore the power of a voice to the people who live there.

Brienne Walsh