The steel industry was already collapsing by the time the photographer and visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier was born, in 1982. Like many Rust Belt communities, her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, has suffered both economic and environmental distress: Thousands of manufacturing jobs have vanished, but chemicals from the steel plants still pollute Braddock’s skies. U.S.S. Edgar Thomson Steel Works and Monongahela River (2013) © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery In The Notion of Family, a series she began as a teenager in 2001 and continued to work on for more than a decade, Frazier examines the physical and psychic toll wrought by industrial decay. The series presents more than simple snapshots of devastation. The Notion of Family is an intimate, intergenerational exploration of the care that Black women show one another as corporations and public safety nets falter. It is also intensely personal: Frazier photographed herself alongside her mother and grandmother, who helped guide her creative decisions. We see a young Frazier sitting on the living-room floor with her …