Momme
Artist
LaToya Ruby Frazier
(American, born 1982)
Date2008
Mediumgelatin silver print mounted on archival mat board
Dimensions47 x 59.3 cm (sheet), 61.1 x 71.1 cm (mount)
ClassificationsPhotographs
Credit LineChapin Riley Fund at the Greater Worcester Community Foundation
Object number2013.13
Label Text
Frazier's series The Notion of Family documents the emotional and physical toll of economic decline on African Americans using her home life in Braddock, Pennsylvania as its backdrop. Rather than viewing systemic racism from afar, Frazier presents the realities of economic struggle from the perspective of an adolescent insider.
The photographs in The Notion of Family range from interiors representing substandard living to vulnerable self-portraits conveying both inner strength and anxiety. A prevailing theme throughout the series is Frazier’s turbulent relationship with her mother. For example, Momme emphasizes the fierce independence of both women, while simultaneously reinforcing their unbreakable bond conveyed visually through the alignment of their shared lips.
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These images photographed in various rooms of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s family house in her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, once a thriving steel mill town, reveal complex intergenerational relationships and an intertwining of people and place. Families, like hers, who remained amidst abandoned businesses, crumbling infrastructure, and industrial pollution also found themselves subject to widespread disparagement in the press. “Every stereotype you can think of,” Frazier says,” is what I grew up seeing in the media. We were demonized as bad, poor, black drug addicts.”
Sensitized to the individual lives affected, Frazier photographed what she describes as “the story of economic globalization and the decline of manufacturing as told through the bodies of three generations of African American women” – her grandmother, mother, and herself. With an extraordinary emotional authenticity in which her subjects assert their own identities, Frazier’s images have complicated and enriched the traditions of portrait and social documentary photography.
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