LaToya Ruby Frazier. The Notion of Family.

Braddock, a steel town

Braddock is a small town in Pennsylvania, in the Monongahela Valley on the edge of Pittsburgh. In 1873 Andrew Carnegie built the Edgar Thomson Steel Works there. For more than a century, life in Braddock turned around the blast furnace.

Then steel declined. Jobs vanished. The population fell. Streets that were once busy filled with empty houses. Braddock today is a majority Black town, marked by long exposure to industrial pollution and to economic neglect.

LaToya Ruby Frazier was born and raised there. She began photographing her family as a teenager. The Notion of Family runs from 2001 to 2014 and was published as a book by Aperture in 2014, after some twelve years of work.

Three generations of women

At the centre are three people: Frazier's grandmother, Grandma Ruby; her mother; and Frazier herself. Three generations, three bodies, one town.

Grandma Ruby did not like being photographed. She used to tell her granddaughter to go and photograph herself instead. Frazier did just that. The refusal became the starting point for her self portraits, and for a way of working in which the photographer does not stand outside the story.

Frazier's mother was different. She took an active part in making the pictures. Many are the result of a collaboration between mother and daughter, choosing where to stand, building the frame together. The usual power relation between photographer and subject is reset. The people in the pictures are not only subjects. They are co authors.

The photographs are black and white, in the tradition of classic documentary photography. But the use of that tradition is new. Documentary work usually means an outsider photographing a community. Here the photographer is family.

History written on the body

The Notion of Family is more than a family album. It is the history of a place told through the bodies that live there. Illness, fatigue, cramped rooms, old walls: all are traces of an industrial town in decline.

Grandma Ruby's stepfather worked his whole life at the Edgar Thomson mill, tearing down and rebuilding furnaces, clearing spilled metal and slag. Grandma Ruby's generation grew up while Braddock still thrived. Frazier's grew up after it had fallen.

In 2010 the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center closed Braddock's hospital and moved it to a wealthier area. Frazier photographed the hospital buildings being demolished. For a town that had already lost its mill, losing its hospital was one more great loss. In the pictures, piles of rubble stand beside human faces.

The series therefore raises questions wider than family: about belonging to a community, about the responsibility of institutions to the places they leave, about the legacy of racism and economic decline in small American towns.

Why the series endures

In 2022 the National Gallery of Art in Washington acquired The Notion of Family. A family album from Braddock entered a national collection. That is a real shift: the story of people usually left out of official history is now kept beside the classics.

Photographing one's own family is an old tradition. Sally Mann photographed her children on a farm in Virginia, where nature and childhood wind together. Frazier carries the tradition into a very different setting: an industrial town where soil and air bear the marks of the furnace, and where family is a way of resisting erasure.

The Notion of Family shows something simple: history is not only in books. It is in houses, in lungs, in pictures of a grandmother who did not want to be photographed.