In her first monograph, LaToya Ruby Frazier examines the intertwined realities of racism, economic collapse and social neglect through the history of Braddock, Pennsylvania, the post-industrial town where she grew up. The project moves between personal testimony and broader political reflection, challenging dominant narratives surrounding American industrial history by centering the experiences of Black families and working-class communities often excluded from official accounts.

Structured around three generations of women — her grandmother, her mother and herself — the work connects family history to questions of civic identity, care and survival. Through portraits, domestic interiors and urban landscapes, the photographs reveal how economic decline becomes inscribed both onto the body and onto the environment itself.

The project also documents the closure of Braddock’s only hospital, reinforcing the relationship between systemic abandonment and everyday life. Working within the traditions of black-and-white documentary photography while simultaneously rethinking them, Frazier approaches image-making as a collaborative and transformative act. Her mother, who participates as subject, collaborator and image-maker, becomes central to a process through which photography reshapes family narratives, intimacy and power relations.

The work ultimately positions photography as both testimony and intervention — a means of reclaiming visibility, memory and agency within histories marked by exclusion and inequality.