The american photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier grew up in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a steel town on the eastern periphery of Pittsburgh, along the Monongahela River. Braddock’s Edgar Thomson Steelworks was the first mill opened by Andrew Carnegie in 1873; it was among the first plants in the United States to use the Bessemer process, an innovation that enabled the mass production of steel. A second Carnegie factory followed in the 1880s. Homestead Works, located a few miles upstream, was for a time the largest steel mill in the world. In 1892, it was the site of one of the most violent conflicts in the history of American labour struggles, leaving at least sixteen dead, many more wounded and the industry free of significant union activity for the next four decades. The valley’s steel industry employed 90,000 people at its height. Its emissions have long since altered the surrounding ecosystems. If you live along the Monongahela, steel is a part of your body.

Steel manufacturing was central to building an upwardly mobile industrial working class in the United States and its decline was proportionally devastating.footnote¹ The collapse of the industry in the 1980s took most of the Monongahela valley’s mills with it. Homestead was shuttered in 1986, the works at McKeesport a few miles down the river closed the following year. Braddock’s Edgar Thomson still operates two blast furnaces (in 2005, it was responsible for nearly 30 per cent of us Steel’s much-diminished domestic production). But though it still pollutes the local air, the plant now employs less than a thousand people. The population of the town has declined dramatically—from a peak of over 20,000 in the interwar period to less than 2,000 today. When the real estate bubble burst in 2008, house values dropped a full 50 per cent. The median household income in Braddock is less than two-fifths that of Pennsylvania’s statewide average. The town’s only hospital closed in 2011.

Frazier’s family history is inseparable from the industry and its fortunes. As she tells it:

My grandmother grew up there when it was prosperous, in the 1930s. My mother grew up there in the ’50s, when the steel plants started to close, and she was around during segregation and the White flight to the suburbs. I grew up there in the ’80s, when the government unleashed crack into our community to finish us off. Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, we’ve internalized the history of what American capitalism can do to people.footnote²

A mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art has brought Braddock to New York’s richest borough.footnote³ Frazier’s first major museum survey in the United States, it features more than two decades of photography, video and installation, beginning with the early portraits of her family and proceeding through several subsequent series which span out across America’s rust belt and beyond. Arranged together, the series interconnect and inform one another—Braddock sheds light on Flint; Baltimore provides new insights into Lordstown, Ohio. This display of work has been conceived as a sequence of what Frazier calls ‘monuments for workers’ thoughts’. As she writes in the accompanying catalogue:

From the Steel Valley, along the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio rivers to the Flint River in ‘Vehicle City’, Flint, Michigan; from historical mineshafts in the Borinage, Belgium, to a historic labour union in Lordstown, Ohio; and from community health workers in Baltimore, Maryland, to a labour leader and civil rights activist in California’s Central Valley, I’ve used my camera as a compass to direct a pathway toward the illuminated truth of the indomitable spirit of working-class families and communities in the twenty-first century.

For this reason, it is incumbent upon me to resist—one photograph at a time, one photo-essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time—historical erasure and historical amnesia.footnote⁴