LaToya Ruby Frazier grew up in Braddock [Pennsylvania]. She’s a photographer who’s been taking pictures of her hometown for two decades, and she says that neither of [the common narratives of this place–as the birthplace of steel or a Rust Belt town revitalized] represent the Braddock she knows. Her Braddock is primarily black, primarily female and primarily poor.

I hope you’ll check out this eye-opening piece about a Rust Belt photographer, who provides an alternative view of the Mon Valley (former steel industry center, outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) to the one featured in the novel, American Rust.

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/05/13/401331744/a-rust-belt-story-retold-through-portraits-of-the-women-who-lived-it