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What do Fraziers photographs actually document?
Everything.The entire postwar American Dream stacked against American blacks.
Trumps own father was found guilty of this.
Even Nixons Housing Secretary said that federal housing policies had drawn a white noose around Black cities.
Then Nixon fired him.
Today less than one percent of Levittowns population is black.
Racism in policy runs deep, with costs that last long even when the policy ends.
Fraziers aesthetic is to get very close to her subjects without ever being predatory or voyeuristic.
Many of her pictures are accompanied by text written in the subjects words.
Elsewhere Frazier provides health statistics, legal proceedings, corporate records.
Fraziers is a world on the edge, pushed to the brink of extinction.
Thats a radical leap.
And its what Frazier has undertaken, drawing in her subjects as collaborators.
Flint Is Familywas made between 2016 and 2017.
We are given micro and macro views of Flints environmental catastrophe, scenes of factories, decrepit streets.
She zeroes in especially on three generations of Cobb family women.
Grandmother Renee, mother Shea, and her daughter Zion.
)Notionis already a landmark of American photography a new AmericanDisasters of War.
The pictures are raw, beautiful, intense, subtle, prophetic.
It is family portrait, autobiography, case study, manifesto, indictment, and howl.
Its no coincidence that Braddock, like Flint, is a majority-black city.
Here is the human cost of systemic negligence, redlining, and other malevolent policy.
In another group of pictures we witness the death of Fraziers grandmother from pancreatic cancer.
Next we see her mothers terrible back-length scar from spinal surgery.
Frazier calls her a prisoner in her own home.
Cynthia, a nurses aide, lives two blocks from Braddocks former hospital (now torn down).
Here she was examined and told to go home because she had no chance of survival.
Thats when Frazier contacted Dr. Esa Davis, a doctor of color from Pittsburgh who knew of Fraziers work.
Davis soon arrived and, working with Frazier, prescribed treatment saying that her mothermuststay in the hospital.
This was done against the wishes of the white doctor.
Thats health care in much of America.
Fortunately, Dr. Esa stepped in again and saw to it that her mother wasnt sent home.
Frazier pictures a not-so-secret but almost ignored war going on in America against the black working class.
Frazier depicts her grandmothers step-father in his coffin.
Meanwhile, this war has been ramped up.
Instead, it is rolling back regulations that Obama had put in place to undo systemic racism.
And housing, of course, is just the start.
What gives these pictures resonance is that theyre from 2016.
These pictures speak volumes to our current situation.
Or so we hoped.
