Love Among the Ruins: A Town in Decline in LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Witness

Love Among the Ruins: A Town in Decline in LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Witness
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs detail the personal loss when a city falls apart.

By Kelly Klaasmeyer Wednesday, Jul 24 2013

LaToya Ruby Frazier was born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, in 1982, right about the time things started to go to hell for the once-booming steel town nine miles outside Pittsburgh. The photographs in “LaToya Ruby Frazier: Witness” at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston document the town’s continued decline. Braddock is where Andrew Carnegie built his first major steel mill in 1873 as well as his first public library. The town was hard hit in the early 1980s, when steel manufacturing almost disappeared. The population fell from more than 20,000 to fewer than 2,500 today. The economic crisis led to the town being redlined â€” turned into a loan and investment dead zone. Then crack took its toll on the area.