A Black Woman, Steel Worker, and Artist […]
Sandra Gould Ford’s copy of the July, 1945, issue of “Men and Steel,” Jones & Laughlin’s magazine for employees and shareholders. Cyanotype print.Courtesy LaToya Ruby Frazier / Gavin Brown’s Enterprise
The New Yorker
October 31, 2017
by Doreen St. Félix
The photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier can capture the decline of an entire economy, the vulnerable cycles of American industry, within a single human face. Like the documentarians Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks before her, she scales down social upheaval to the intimate, modest scale of portraiture. It is the long shadow of the Rust Belt steel boom that especially compels her; she is a black child of Braddock, a “financially distressed municipality” of Pittsburgh, according to the Pennsylvania government, where Andrew Carnegie and the barons of metal had once established monopolies on that dangerous, alchemical work.
Courtesy of: The New Yorker
