Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic LaToya Ruby Frazier started taking pictures as a teenager in the unravelling steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Those photos in the early 2000s were mostly of her family — intimate, indoor shots quivering with psychological undertones. In the ensuing decades, her view of kinship has expanded across the US to embrace vast segments of the betrayed proletariat.As an ardent and vexing retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art makes clear, that wider lens and social depth of field has cost her some poetic focus. She has made up the deficit with prose. MoMA’s galleries are packed with images (some great, many not) and overflowing with words.In those first years of domestic investigation, Frazier’s mother and grandmother opened themselves to her probing eye. Already then, the prodigy understood how quickly and ruthlessly daily rituals whirl away into the past. We see her and her grandmother sitting on the floor of the elder woman’s living room, surrounded by an offbeat accumulation of stuff: an antiquated telephone, a pair of nude bronze figurines, a grandfather clock, a gumball machine and one emissary from a vast collection of porcelain-headed dolls.In the photo, from the series “The Notion of Family” (2001-14), the two bodies curve away and then towards each other in heart-shaped harmony. They both stare at the camera, the older woman with an expression of impassive scepticism, the young Frazier wearing the barest hint of a smile. But the atmosphere isn’t grim. You sense the women’s sense of comfort and pleasure from being ensconced together in a corner crammed with palpable memories.The scenes of the artist with her mother are more complex and unnerving. In one, “Mom and Me on her Couch,” they pose side by side on a sofa. Their outfits are identical (jeans and white tank tops), their connection powerful but strained. In the spare, stage-like space, they sit in mirrored attitudes of melancholy, each tilted head resting on one hand. There is resentment here, but also an effort to come together.Braddock was once a prosperous place: in the late 19th century, Andrew Carnegie built his first steel mill and his first library there. But by the time Frazier was growing up, the mills’ clangour had hushed, the furnaces cooled and the population depleted. Frazier’s was one of the Black families left in the crumbling wreck of a city, with few jobs, poor healthcare and an environment poisoned by industrial effluvia.She developed complex feelings about the town that both nurtured and abandoned her: a mixture of reportorial relentlessness, anger and tenderness powers her photography. She learned to chronicle sickness and death — both her relatives’ and her community’s. Shortly after her grandmother died of cancer (caused, she believed, by the steel mills’ exhalations), the hospital shut down, too, one more closure in a long history of deletions.Braddock is hardly alone in its misery. As Frazier discovered, neglect and obliteration are ubiquitous. For her, that fact yielded a mission. “It is incumbent upon me to resist — one photograph at a time, one photo-essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time — historical erasure and historical amnesia,” she said in a 2022 address at MoMA. Let others put up statues to war heroes and industrial titans; Frazier invents alternative monuments, dedicated to the endangered working class.This project has been attempted before, especially during the Depression. Frazier cites Dorothea Lange’s indelible portrait of Florence Owens Thompson (the woman known as “Migrant Mother”) and her three small children. But she has no use for Lange’s way of framing Thompson as a Dustbowl Madonna or cotton pickers as fieldworkers out of a painting by Millet. She’s not interested in ennobling the downtrodden by assimilating them into an art-historical tradition.Instead, Frazier hands over to her subjects the power to tell their own stories. She takes understated, almost anti-monumental portraits and pairs them with poster-sized blocks of text: the sitters’ words, extracted from interviews and printed verbatim.The camera traditionally enshrines a set of ossified power relationships in which the subject passively inhabits a world that the photographer is free to shape. At times, Frazier challenges that arrangement, as when in 2016 she visited Flint, Michigan — a rustbelt city now largely Black and poor and sick, poisoned by a contaminated water supply.Frazier teamed up with local residents and spent years producing “Flint is Family In Three Acts” (2016-20). The work consists of a video documenting the water crisis; a series of stills following one mother and daughter’s flight to a farm in Mississippi, part of a Great Migration in reverse; and a third section back in Flint, documenting efforts to procure a generator that can distil fresh water from moisture in the air.The work draws much of its power from Frazier’s collaborators, whom we get to know through biographical details that turn them from victims into personages. “My name is Shea Cobb,” proclaims the text accompanying an unremarkable portrait of a woman standing between “Vote Here” signs at the local elementary school. “I was born and raised here in Flint. I am a bus driver, a coach, singer, songwriter, poet and student. I attended Southwestern Academy, Mott Community College and the University of Michigan, Flint.” She’s not an emblem but an individual with history and agency.In two later all-out campaigns, Frazier tipped into outrage that can be exhausting to absorb. In 2019, she shot “The Last Cruze”, created “in solidarity with the United Auto Workers Locals 1112 and 1714” in the ironically named Lordstown, Ohio. There she documented the traumatic disruptions when the town’s GM overlords idled a Chevrolet factory, scattering many workers (and their children, spouses, pets) to distant plants.During the pandemic, she embedded with a team of badly paid community health workers at Johns Hopkins and other hospitals who fan out across Baltimore to connect low-income patients with medical services. The pictures, mounted on IV poles alongside slabs of prose, tend to be undramatic and repetitious. That’s part of the point. The injustices Frazier highlights are extreme but common, and the people who cope with them can’t be reduced to a splash of ink on glossy paper and a terse caption. Presenting the scale and personal cost of a massive social shift requires patience, an eye for detail and unhurried authenticity.Unfortunately, that combo doesn’t lend itself to a museum show. I had the galleries practically to myself on the day I visited, which was a good thing because three’s a crowd if you’re all trying to read through a wall tome at the same time. Even so, several hours in the museum weren’t enough, so I spent a whole day and part of a night ploughing through the material at home, marvelling at Frazier’s thoroughness, her imperviousness to boredom and her faith that the public will prove as committed and indefatigable as she is.To September 7, moma.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
