LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital
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| LaToya Ruby Frazier, self portrait during lupus attack |
I first read about LaToya Ruby Frazier in a review in the
New York Times last March. A photographer in her early thirties, Frazier's exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, "LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital," chronicles her family's life in the dying steel mill town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. The exhibit, which runs at the Brooklyn Museum until August 11th, and is the first major solo show by Frazier, a rising young photographer.
Frazier's camera is unblinking in recording the decline and death of her grandfather and grandmother, as well as her mother's battle with cancer and Frazier's own battle with lupus. The mills brought prosperity to the town and good blue-collar jobs, but poisoned the earth and its residents. The mills are now gone but the disease and despair remain.
The black-and-white prints show a town stripped of its wealth and future and a family that is waiting for the death of its elders. There is a photo of the grandfather in the hospital having his ass wiped. There are mournful images of the grandmother in her funereal house in a living room surrounded by dolls. There is the grandmother's bedside table, with her pack of Pall Malls (an old person's cigarette that gave the illusion of class) and old pictures of her children and grandchildren placed on a lace doily.
In one photo, the grandmother has dressed her granddaughter up as a doll, pulling her hair in long, twisted braids. For a brief moment that is frozen in time, the photographer has become a beautiful little girl.
During its heyday, Braddock had a thriving working-class black community. This community was written out of the official histories of the town, which was the site of Andrew Carnegie's first steel mill in the 19th century.
Frazier also records the gutting of Braddock, as the town's only hospital is shut down and brutally dismembered. A lone protester attacks the closure as part of a racist policy.
There is the unspoken dysfunction of Frazier's family. The mother has several boyfriends over the course of the exhibit's time frame, and in their photos, the older men are either posed stiffly or are shown in the dreary moments of waking up. In one portrait, her mother, who is a striking woman in her fifties, sits in a working-class gin mill at the bar, staring warily at her daughter's reflection. Above the mother's head hangs Christmas stockings, put up by a festive bartender or customer.
The exhibit is held in a dark gallery on the second floor. The wall paper behind the selected silver gelatin prints are historical photos of Braddock, family snapshots and other images taken by Frazier. The photographic wall paper is jarring, but works in following the chaos of the Frazier family life and how their destiny is directly linked to the town of Braddock.
in the photos in the exhibit, Frazier portrays a town and a family stripped of joy. It may be the photographer's choice not to show more joyful moments. In one poignant photograph, Frazier stands in front of her grandparents' house wearing her grandfather's pajamas. The image is an effective memorial to the dead man and the dying city.
Frazier herself has broken away. She now lives in both New Jersey and Brooklyn. In the exhibit, she looks at the wreckage of her family, the pieces of detritus on the floor after her late grandmother's carpet has been pulled up
At the end of the exhibit, Ruby LaToya Frazier and her mother are posed in front of the grandmother's coffin, for her wake, or what the African-American community would refer to as her homecoming.
--Dylan Foley
Here is the New York Times review from late March:
Art Review
The Flesh and the Asphalt, Both Weak
LaToya Ruby Frazier Photography at Brooklyn Museum
Courtesy of LaToya Ruby Frazier and the Brooklyn Museum
“Fifth Street Tavern and UPMC Braddock Hospital on Braddock Avenue” (2011).
By
KAREN ROSENBERG
Published: March 28, 2013
Braddock, Pa., is about nine miles southeast of Pittsburgh, hugging the
eastern bank of the Monongahela River. But in the photographs of LaToya
Ruby Frazier, who grew up in this steel town, its coordinates are not so
precise. Braddock is in the bodies of Ms. Frazier’s elder family
members, who used to work at the local mills; it’s in the empty
foundation of the hospital that used to serve them, before it was closed
and demolished. It’s there in every picture Ms. Frazier has taken, and
it’s here in her outstanding first New York solo show.
LaToya Ruby Frazier, the photographer and subject of “Huxtables, Mom and Me” (2009).
LaToya Ruby Frazier's "Grandma Ruby and Me" (2005).
Courtesy of LaToya Ruby Frazier and the Brooklyn Museum
LaToya Ruby Frazier's "Self Portrait In Gramps' Pajamas" (2009).
The exhibition, “
LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital” at the Brooklyn Museum, follows her standout appearances in the 2012
Whitney Biennial
and in the New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” triennial of 2009. It
offers further proof of her gifts and a deeper look at her series “The
Notion of Family,” initiated in 2002.
This preternaturally mature body of work (Ms. Frazier is just 31)
connects bedrooms and streetscapes, the suffering of loved ones and the
afflictions of a “
distressed municipality”
(the state’s official term for Braddock and other ailing Rust Belt
towns). Simultaneously introspective and extroverted, it’s composed of
arresting black-and-white photographs that sometimes look like studio
portraits or social documentaries but aren’t fully at home in either
category.
Take “Huxtables, Mom and Me,” in which Ms. Frazier stares at the camera
and her mother, reflected in a full-length mirror. She is wearing a
faded T-shirt emblazoned with the cast and logo of “The Cosby Show,” a
program she recalls having watched “to escape the reality of my
dismantled working-class family.” You don’t even need to read that
statement, in the wall label, to grasp that this is an image of
regression to childhood that’s laced with a very adult sense of
disillusionment.
Another photograph shows an elderly woman standing next to a lamppost
outside the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Braddock. It
seems to belong to the genre of street photography — the woman does not
make eye contact, and the camera catches a man striding through the
intersection — but the main subject is identified as “Grandma Ruby,” and
we have already seen her as the frail odalisque of “Grandma Ruby on Her
Bed.” A few pictures later we will see her lying in her coffin,
attended by her daughter and granddaughter and some dolls from her
collection.
We will also see the hospital building, or what remains of it, after it’s been hit by the wrecking ball. Ms. Frazier’s series “
Campaign for Braddock Hospital (Save Our Community Hospital),”
shown at the Whitney but not included here, fills the narrative gap. In
one shot here a tavern sits on the edge of the rubble-strewn lot,
looking very much like a ghost-town facade.
The show’s installation, overseen by the museum’s contemporary art
managing curator, Eugenie Tsai, with generous input from Ms. Frazier,
cuts back and forth between family and community scenes to filmic
effect. It’s anchored by wallpaper at both ends of the gallery, an
immersive patchwork reproducing Ms. Frazier’s works and found family
photographs along with archival images of Braddock and other Rust Belt
towns.
The wallpaper, Ms. Frazier says, was inspired by her discovery that a
2008 book on the history of Braddock contained no mention of
African-Americans. A corrective to that history, the wallpaper is
accompanied by a triptych of raster-etched aluminum plates that
positions a childhood snapshot of Ms. Frazier between a biography of her
ancestor John Frazier and a portrait of Andrew Carnegie.
Not as pointed, but more poignant, is the self-portrait she took in her
grandparents’ old house after their deaths, wearing the pajamas of
“Gramps” and looking alarmingly vulnerable in the decrepit interior.
(This picture and related ones in the “Homebody” series, taken at the
house, aren’t in the show, but this one is tucked into the museum’s
fifth-floor collection display, “American Identities.”)
In another self-portrait she wears Grandma Ruby’s satin pajama pants and
poses in front of a striped bedsheet (also her grandmother’s), looking
haggard. The label tells us that this picture is one of several that
document Ms. Frazier’s periodic attacks of lupus, an immune-system
disease.
Here and in photographs of her mother and grandmother Ms. Frazier’s candid approach to illness may bring to mind projects like
Hannah Wilke’s “Intra-Venus,” an intense photo diary of her terminal cancer.
Elsewhere Ms. Frazier looks at more than her own body. “
I view Grandma Ruby, Mom and myself as one entity,”
she has said. Ultimately, the photographs comment on the toxins lurking
in Braddock and other deindustrialized cities, toxins that may also
have sickened her mother and grandmother. (Ms. Frazier learned in 2008
that both had diagnoses of cancer.)
You can’t go home again, as the saying holds. In the photographs that
make up “A Haunted Capital” Ms. Frazier is grappling with a different
problem: not being able to leave.
“LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital” runs through Aug. 11 at the
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000,
brooklynmuseum.org.
