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POMERANZ COLLECTION

LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER

Mom Making an Image of Me
2008
Gelatin silver print
Ed 7/8 + 2 AP
40 x 50,8 cm (print)
62 x 72,5 cm (+frame)
Inv. Nr. 178

Born in 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania
Lives and works between Braddock, Pennsylvania, New-York and Chicago

In her photographs, the artist LaToya Ruby Frazier, rising star of the new generation, combines intimate extracts of her relationships with her grandmother and mother with the history of the African American community of Braddock, Pennsylvania, the town where she grew up. Between intimate photography and social documentary, she reports the decline of this once prosperous steel-producing town, where poverty, unemployment and health problems relating to pollution have largely devastated the local population. LaToya Ruby Frazier's work mainly consists of self-portraits and portraits of her grandmother and mother, to whom she taught photographic techniques and she considers as a collaborator. This two photographs, Mom Making an Image of Me and Aunt Midgie and Grandma Ruby, are part of Frazier’s best-known work to date, an ongoing series of searing black-and-white photographs documenting the artist’s family, one of the many that has borne the brunt of the town’s social, economic, and environmental decline.