Grandma Ruby and Me from The Notion of Family, 2005
Art: © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone gallery
As long as she could remember, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s hometown had been in trouble. She was born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, in 1982, too late for the theaters, shops, and stable jobs at the steel mill that her Grandma Ruby remembered and just in time for the decline of American steel and the “war on drugs.” The Braddock that Frazier knew was exhausted, as were her great-grandfather, her grandmother, her mother. But she wasn’t exhausted yet. Not quite 20, she got her hands on a camera and started working. In clear-eyed black and white, she put her own frame around her life. At first, her…
