LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographic series The Notion of Family focuses on three generations of women in Braddock, Pennsylvania—the artist, her mother, and her grandmother. Although focused on her hometown—a once booming steel town near Pittsburgh—the series speaks to the necessity of family support and community resilience in the face of systemic racism, and failed government policies that result in the economic decline experienced in much of small town America.

The photograph on display in True Likeness is just one self-portrait from Frazier’s series. Frazier is seated on the edge of a bed, a pinstriped bedsheet extending in all directions around her. She gazes directly at the viewer, simultaneously projecting both vulnerability and resilience. Many of Frazier’s portraits from this time period reference medical issues – the cancer diagnoses of her Grandma Ruby and her mother, as well as the artist’s own battle with lupus – all the more devastating due to the closing of the town’s only hospital. Frazier’s self portrait reminds us that history and trauma can be visualized on the body.

Frazier has continued her exploration of trauma and resilience through more recent series such as Flint is Family, documenting multiple generations impacted by the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, a poor and mostly Black community. Her photographs from Louisville accompanied Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Vanity Fair article "A Beautiful Life," about Breonna Taylor—and the family left behind—after police murdered Taylor in her apartment on March 13, 2020.

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