This TED Talk features artist and photographer, LaToya Ruby Frazier, recorded live at We the Future 2019.

So in 2016, I was commissioned to produce a photo essay about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

And that's been going on since 2014.

And I accepted the commission with the idea that I would photograph three generations

of women dealing with the crisis on a daily basis.

I was fortunate to meet two best friends, artists, activists and poets,

Amber Hassan and Shay Cobb, who took me around Flint. As a school bus driver, Shay Cobb became

the central figure of the photo essay, along with her mother, Ms. Renee, and her eight-year-old

daughter, Zion. I obsessively followed Shay's school bus routes. And when Shea wasn't driving the

bus, she would be watching over Zion making sure she was studying. I embedded myself in every intimate facet of Shea's life.

When Shea took me to Zion's school,

and I saw the water fountains covered with signs that said,

contaminated, do not drink.

I couldn't pick up my camera to photograph it.

It rocked me to the core to see that in America,

we can go from fountains that say whites or blacks only

to today seeing fountains that say contaminated water do not drink.

And somehow, that's acceptable?

The residents in Flint have been forced to drink with, cook with, and bathe with bottled water while paying the highest water bills in the country for water that is infected

with deadly legionella bacteria.

It was natural for me to go to Flint because industrial pollution, bacteria contaminated water were all too familiar from me growing up in my hometown, Braddock, Pennsylvania, where my

mother and I battled cancer and autoimmune disorders like lupus.

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