Object of the Month: LaToya Ruby Frazier’s "Grandma Ruby and J.C. in Her Kitchen 2006"

February’s “Object of the Month” is LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Grandma Ruby and J.C. in Her Kitchen 2006. The BCMA acquired this photograph last year, and it is currently featured in the exhibition Among Women, now on view in the Boyd Gallery until April 7th. The photograph comes from a series that Frazier (born 1982) created between 2001 and 2014 in which she documented the lives of three generations of women in her family: her grandmother, her mother, and herself.

The photographs in this series were taken in and around her childhood home in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Located on the Monongahela River outside Pittsburgh, Braddock is the site of Andrew Carnegie’s first steel mill, the Edgar Thomson Works, which began operating in 1875 and is the last functioning mill of this kind in the region. Frazier’s multi-generational portrait speaks about these women’s lives in Braddock amidst the slow decline of the steel industry.

Frazier considers the series a collaboration with her family. “My grandmother, mother, and I are authoring those images,” she has commented. “I would take the contact sheets home and my mother would say, ‘look I wanted you to take this photograph of me because that’s who I was then, it’s not who I am now. The moment you clicked the shutter on that photograph it was no longer me.’”

In 2014 she published the series in the critically-acclaimed book The Notion of Family. A former recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, Frazier is currently an Associate Professor of Photograpyh at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The article originally published January 28, 2019 referred incorrectly to the number of generations present and to the gender of the child as female.