LaToya Ruby Frazier

We vistited the Anderson Gallery on last Thursday to review some work by LaToya Ruby Frazier. Her collection titled, A Haunted Capital, features photos from her hometown in Braddock, PA and the effect of industrialization from the steel mills on her hometown. She had been working on this series since she was eighteen years old, and uses images of her family to show the slowing decay of her hometown, and the effects of pollution that surrounds the place. What I found to be most interesting was her use of a Levi's ad campaign set in Braddock that completely skates over the issues that her hometown was facing e.g. the closing of UPMC hopsital. She places these ads next to pictures of protesters, with handwritten notes such as "How can we go forth when our borough's buses and ambulances have been cut?". She describes how this ad campaign skates over the fact that Braddock is an industrial town that had been abandoned by the government since the Reagan Era and is now dominated by the steel corporation, producing toxins and pollutions in the area where the elderly and sick now reside, but are now unable to be provided proper healthcare.