Flint is Family Series

LaToya Ruby Frazier, American, born 1982

Flint is Family, 2016

The Flint water crisis is another example of the violence people of color and people of poverty experience worldwide. Astoundingly this violence is seen all over America. A country of wealth and power and an extensive government with agencies to protect the people against problems like these. However, the people of Flint, Michigan, were exempt from the protection of the government. The greedy officials neglected children, such as the one in this photograph, from their right to drink water, bathe, and brush their teeth. They were plagued by a toxic water supply sparked from a switch the state used to save money. The residents of all ages quickly fell ill to the toxicity. The background of the photograph shows a protestor holding up a “Flint Lives Matter” sign. This symbol further connects the water tragedy in Flint to the Black Lives Matter movement across the US today. The slow violence and systematic racism in our country prove the ideals that America boasts are only there to protect a select group, which is wealthy white Americans. Label by Annabel Bentley

The photograph from the series Flint is Family (2016) by LaToya Ruby Frazier effectively puts a face on how environmental factors like lead affect individuals. It presents an innocent young boy alongside a man in a hazmat suit, both seeking protection from danger, but with vastly different levels of exposure. This striking juxtaposition helps the audience comprehend the magnitude of the issue and those most affected by it. Such a form of protest proves highly effective in raising awareness and visibility for those who have been marginalized for generations. Label by Jackson Smith

Bridge Over Flint 24

Matthew Brandt, American, born 1982

Bridge Over Flint 24, 2016

This photo depicts a bridge over the Flint River, the primary water source for the city of Flint, Michigan. As of 2014, the water of the Flint River has been used as the primary water supply for the city of Flint. In the years since, the people of Flint have faced lead poisoning, outbreaks of disease, and severe financial damage because of the poisoned water and the shoddy infrastructure and governmental misconduct that poisoned it. In this image, Matthew Brandt plainly represents the often invisible dangers of Flint’s water to viewers in the discoloration of the image. Brandt developed the image with tap water from Flint as well as other substances to create this damaged and ominous effect. Brandt connects physically and visually connects Flint’s poisoned tap water with the river it comes from as well as with local infrastructure to demonstrate to viewers the dangers of Flint’s water as well as the reason it is so dangerous. Label by Caitlin Blomo

Flint is Family Series

LaToya Ruby Frazier, American, born 1982

Flint is Family, 2016

LaToya Ruby Frasier is a multi-media artists who’s bodies of work center on social justice and the American experience to address urgent issues of politics and cultural change. Her collection Flint is Family, follows Shea Cobb and her family through her life in Flint, and provides and intimate look into the lives of those still affected by Flint’s contaminated water. Frasier directly connects and interacts with her subject and those experiencing environmental injustice, making her work particularly impactful as she takes the time to not only represent Flint, but amplify the voices its residents- an essential element of art and environmental justice. Not only does Frasier capture Cobb and those demanding justice, but she moves a step further to make actual change in conjunction with her work, bringing an atmospheric water generator to deliver clean water to the people she photographed, establishing an important connection to the place she used in her art. Label by Molly McCarthy Flood

Bridge over Flint 8

Matthew Brandt, American, born 1982

Bridge over Flint 8, 2016

This photograph is part of American photographer Matthew Brandt’s “Bridges Over Flint” project in which Brandt developed the photographs using a solution that includes Flint, Michigan, tap water. His series incorporates photographs of numerous locations around Flint in black and white developed with the tap water solution. As a result of the lead and other toxins in Flint’s water, the image is distorted through the development process. This mirrors the way in which the people of Flint are also affected—developed—by their interactions with the water and the deleterious effects it has had (and continues to have) on their health as well as the city more broadly. It seems significant to me that the photographs are of bridges in particular as they one remind me of Pauli’s reflection(s) on how he tried to build bridges within the Flint community and the ways that bridges serve as infrastructural linkages between potentially disparate populations. Label by Jay Jolles

Developed using lead-contaminated tap water from the photographed location of Flint, Michigan, Matthew Brandt’s Bridge Over Flint 24 shows a nearly unidentifiable bridge across a small river with trees on the embankments on either side. The distortion of the photo and it’s edges is intense, looking almost as though it was singed in a fire. Rather than flames, though, the photo’s visual corruption comes from the byproduct of Flint’s own political corruption: residential water so contaminated with lead as to be completely unsafe and unusable. By employing the invisible danger in his work, Brandt makes visible, quite literally, the destructive nature of lead. Label by Lia Deasy