Latoya Ruby Frazier, American, born 1982
Untitled, 2016
This photo, appearing in artist and activist Latoya Ruby Frazier’s photoessay Flint is Family, depicts the Flint poet Shea Cobb standing on a bridge above the Flint River. This photoessay is one rooted in both place and people, following Cobb’s family for six months as they grapple with the ongoing water crisis in their city. This particular image highlights the intersecting role of nature, governmental infrastructure, and human beings in the fight for clean water in Flint. The image depicts a bridge, upheld by intersecting girders, over the Flint River, which takes up most of the background. A lightpost and a dead tree in the water, almost parallel to one another, also appear in the image. In the center of the photograph is a singular Black woman, looking up at the camera with her head slightly tilted, as if asking a question. In this image, the various aspects of the Flint Water Crisis all intersect, quite literally illustrated by the intersecting straight lines of the bridge, the supports, the lines on the railing, the river, and the other objects in the photo. The Flint River, the natural origin of much of the dirty water in the Flint, intersects with the man-made bridge, a potential representation of the government’s infrastructure that poses the true threat to the inhabitants of Flint. In the middle of this intersection is a human being, a Black woman and a resident of the city—an indication that any understanding of the water crisis in Flint must focus its attention on the effect that institutional mishandling of nature and infrastructure has on the people in the city. Label by Maxwell Cloe