Through her photographic work, LaToya Ruby Frazier (1982, Braddock, USA) seeks to give visibility to people, places and issues that remain underrepresented. Her seminal work, The Notion of Family (2001–14), drew upon her own experiences, portraying her family life. Frazier’s work stands out for its capacity to raise questions of inequality, healthcare, the consequences of deindustrialisation, and social and environmental justice, taking personal situations and experiences as its starting point. Drawing upon a range of influences – from the photographs that shaped the documentary style of the 20th century (e.g. Walker Evans (1903–1975), Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) and Gordon Parks (1912–2006)), via performance art and the conceptual art of the 1960s, to African American literature – her work regenerates the tradition of documentary photography by approaching it from an intimate and collaborative standpoint.

Flint is Family (2016–17) is a collection of 26 silver prints in black and white that were originally produced in response to a 2016 commission from the US edition of Elle magazine. It documents, in the form of a photographic essay, one of the most serious public health crises experienced in the United States: the contamination of drinking water with lead in the city of Flint (Michigan) that occurred following changes made by the local authority to the water supply system in an effort to cut costs. As in The Notion of Family, Frazier considers the consequences of this crisis through the prism of three generations of women: Shea Cobb, a poet and school bus driver, her mother, Renée Cobb, and her daughter, Zion. The series combines fragments of their everyday life through which the public health crisis is rendered visible, moments of civil protest, and aerial views of the urban and industrial setting, thus forging links between personal experiences and political, social and environmental realities.