In a city grappling with poisonous water, award-winning photographer and MacArthur Genius LaToya Ruby Frazier found hope. She first travelled to Flint, Michigan in 2016 to document how the city’s water supply was contaminated and poisoning the residents. There, she teamed up with community members to document not only the injustice and environmental racism, but more importantly, the hope and resilience that Flint’s residents displayed. Six years later, her new book Flint is Family in Three Acts tells the story of a community banding together to confront inequality.
LaToya’s Flint photography was featured in The New York Times, which said, “The words, portraits and actions in this book place an ongoing disaster in broader context: American, humanitarian, human.”
This photobook is the most recent project in LaToya’s long history of ground-breaking social documentary work. Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz called her “one of the strongest artists to emerge in this country this century.” LaToya proves that creativity has power, and that we can be the architects of our own futures—even in the worst of conditions. “No matter how dark a situation may be,” she says, “a camera can extract the light and turn a negative into a positive.”
Watch LaToya’s TED Talk on the Flint water crisis, which has over two million views:
