Mom Making an Image of Me

Photographed here with her mother, LaToya Ruby Frazier uses her personal family history to emphasize the impact of socioeconomic and political forces on individual lives and communities. Braddock, an industrial mill town near Pittsburgh, was once a vital cultural center sustained by the steel industry. As mills closed in the 1960s and 1970s, white residents who could afford to moved away, while communities of color faced discriminatory housing practices that kept them from relocating. Frazier has been documenting her friends, families, and neighbors in Braddock since she was sixteen.