Latoya Ruby Frazier
de Denis Gielen, Joanna Leroy, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jean-Marc Prevost
A 2016 residency at Grand-Hornu allowed LaToya to pursue her work on post-industrial society in Belgium, turning her camera to the Borinage, a mining region whose intense activity in the 19th century was diminished by a series of crises that led to the closure of the last mine in 1976. Testimonies gathered by Frazier from the former miners and their families have resulted in And from the Coaltips a Tree Will Rise, an extensive collection of portraits, landscapes and still lifes. LaToya Ruby Frazier grew up in Braddock, in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, at the heart of the Rust Belt. The Bottom refers to the lower, poorest part of the town which is closest to the Edgar Thomson Plant, founded in 1872 by Andrew Carnegie. It was here that aged sixteen, LaToya Ruby Frazier became aware of the need to bear witness to the impact of deindustrialisation on the Afro-American community. She did so by photographing her family through three generations of women (her grandmother, her mother and herself), along with the landscapes of this former flagship of the steel industry which had by then been abandoned. Braddock's recent history, forged by resurgent waves of unemployment, mounting poverty, demographic decline, the appearance of diseases, hospital closures, are inscribed on the bodies and landscapes which LaToya Ruby Frazier juxtaposes in The Notion of Family. Laying claim to the heritage of socio-documentary photography initiated by the FSA (Farm Security Administration), LaToya Ruby Frazier adds to this archive of working-class reality begun in the 1930s by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and others, capturing the town's and her own family's history from the inside-which is what makes her work unique. Her political engagement and struggle against social inequalities are revealed in her rigorous photographic framing. Given this conceptual aspect, her photography reaches far beyond what is strictly considered as documentation.