Excerpt
SUMMARY: Braddock, Pennsylvania, was once a thriving steel town before the town’s industry collapsed. It's where LaToya Ruby Frazier grew up, like her mother and grandmother before her, and it's where the visual artist and 2015 MacArthur fellow has returned to document the change her community has endured. Jeffrey Brown talks with Frazier about her art and activism.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Finally, a look at a photographer’s more-than-decade-long project documenting hope and despair in her hometown.
Jeffrey Brown has that story.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Braddock, Pennsylvania, about nine miles outside of Pittsburgh, a once thriving steel town of some 20,000, now down to one-tenth of that, and captured through the very personal lens of LaToya Ruby Frazier, the 32-year-old winner of one of this year’s MacArthur Fellowships.
LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER, Photographer: I see myself as an artist and a citizen that’s documenting and telling the story and building the archive of working-class families facing all this change that’s happening, because it has to be documented.
JEFFREY BROWN: These days, Frazier teaches and lives in Chicago, where we talked to her, but her true home, her childhood home, is the one found in her work.
It’s a project titled “The Notion of Family” that she began more than a decade ago, documenting three generations of African-American women in a particular time and place.
LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER: My grandmother, who grew up there in the ’30s, when Braddock was prosperous and a city itself that everyone came to, to my mother growing up there in the ’60s during segregation and white flight and the beginning of the collapse of the steel industry, to myself growing up there in the ’80s and ’90s, when the factories were already dismantled and the war on drugs kind of hit its peak.
JEFFREY BROWN: Educator and photographer Lewis Hine used his camera for social reform. Photographers from the Farm Security Administration documented the poverty of the Depression, the pioneering work of Gordon Parks in the 1940s and ’50s.
Frazier sees herself working in this tradition, first and foremost, though, as a visual artist.
LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER: The art comes in with how it’s crafted, how it’s made, the material, me understanding the history, because the images, they’re not purely documents.
If you look at them, first and foremost, the fact that I appear on the other side of the camera lets you know that this is contemporary art, because now I’m performing and doing gestures in front of the camera to create…
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