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As long as she could remember, LaToya Ruby Fraziers hometown had been in trouble.
The Braddock that Frazier knew was exhausted, as were her great-grandfather, her grandmother, her mother.
But she wasnt exhausted yet.
Not quite 20, she got her hands on a camera and started working.
In clear-eyed black and white, she put her own frame around her life.
Then she started building what she needed to see.
She called the series The Notion of Family.
Theres a reason why sophomore slump is so common.
The first big thing you put out tends to be the one youve been making all your life.
Her pictures of abandoned buildings arent ruin porn: Theyre Braddocks phantom limbs.
An entire world can be found in one image.
An argument hangs in the air; Fraziers photographs hang on her mothers walls.
(We know theyre hers because some are part of the same series.)
If only the rest of the show trusted photography as much as The Notion of Family does.
Now Frazier is the Lange in the scenario, the successful artist telling other peoples stories with her camera.
At MoMA we see her wrestle with this change.
Do you have the bandwidth for that?
Does a family of dehydrated MoMA-attending tourists?
Frazier is so good at working deep that doing both here feels like trying to swim Lake Superior.
Frazier followed, and the images she made of the family on their land are stirring and sublime.
Ahead of them, we see a grazing horse and a barn, its sides wide open and generous.
Above them an ancient tree stretches its branches, protective.
The third act was direct action, documented.
Perhaps knowing whom she needs to convince, Frazier endeavors to make her subjects heroic.
This means that a corner dedicated to exposing work conditions is hard to actually see.
The title of the show, Monuments of Solidarity, is meant to ennoble Fraziers subjects and collaborators.
My bosses were very excited that we were doing the book.
I understood that Frazier was a rising star.
I was also barely making any money.
(I checked the price for this first edition online; one copy was going for $375.)
But what would happen if you did?
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated who designed the layout for The Last Cruze.
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