The photographs of LaToya Ruby Frazier occupy a shifting ground between social document and fine art object, a space where politics, poetry and autobiography share equal weight. At the young age of 31, the artist and activist is celebrating her first solo museum exhibition in New York, LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital on view at the Brooklyn Museum through August 11. The show features over forty black and white photographs that are part of an ongoing project in which her family — favored subjects include her estranged mother and recently deceased grandmother – acts as a prism through which to view the economic downturn of their hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, site of Andrew Carnegie’s first steel mill. Frazier powerfully appropriates the boldly austere aesthetic of Depression-era photography. Without a hint of pretense or sentimentality, her work transforms images of blighted urban landscapes into a total psychic portrait of a town, a family, and a nation in crisis. Be warned: you will be seduced and changed by this truly haunting exhibition.
The Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY (718) 638-5000
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