Originally appearing in LaToya Ruby Frazier’s first monograph The Notion of Family, this photograph is inseparable from its sequence in the book. This context is essential to understanding both the perspective of the artist and the subjective reading of the viewer. Seen isolated from the pages of the book, be it on a gallery wall or on a computer screen, the photograph appears to depict nothing more than an American industrial landscape, perhaps stylistically following in the footsteps of the New Topographics photographers. But when one flips through The Notion of Family in order, by the time the viewer’s eyes fall on U.S.S. Edgar Thomson Steel Works and Monongahela River, it is much more than an industrial landscape. As Frazier has said of both her project and her broader vision for photography: “We need longer sustained stories that reflect and tell us where the prejudices and blind spots are and continue to be in this culture and society. This is a race and class issue that is affecting everyone. It is not a black problem, it is an American problem, it is a global problem. Braddock is everywhere.”¹ This expansive, seeming depersonalized space becomes intimately personal, a canvas for Frazier’s exploration of her mother and grandmother, her home of Braddock, Pennsylvania, the social, economic, and health issues wrought by the deindustrialization of the town and its steel mills. The landscape becomes a construction not of Carnegie or long-past industrial forces, but one both fueled by and generating immediate, contemporary issues of race, class, and gender. And if the viewer still has any doubt about this, to the right of the photograph sits this text, written by Frazier:
A sewer
A drain
A place for throwing waste
Like W. E. B. Du Bois, I too was born by a golden river, in the shadow of two great hills.
-Jacob Edwards
1 Berger, Maurice, “LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Notion of Family,” Lens Blog, New York Times, Oct. 14, 2014, accessed July 3, 2015 http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/latoya-ruby-fraziers-notion-of-family/
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