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Wayne Lawrence

Detroit journalist Biba Adams stands for a portrait at her home with daughter Maria Williams and granddaughter Gia Williams in Detroit on June 10, 2020. Adams lost her mother, grandmother, and aunt to the coronavirus. “To lose one’s mother is one thing,” Adams said in late July 2020, when U.S. pandemic death totals were pushing past 150,000. “To lose her as one of 150,000 people is even more painful. I don’t want her to just be a number. She had dreams, things she still wanted to do. She was a person. And I am going to lift her name up.”

Elaine Fields stands close to her husband's gravesite at the Elmwood Cemetary in Detroit, on June 14, 2020. Eddie Fields, a retired General Motors plant worker, had died from COVID-19 complications in April. "It's hard because we haven't been able to mourn,” Elaine told photographer Wayne Lawrence. “We weren't able to be with him or have a funeral, so our mourning has been stunted."

“It was important to me that I become part of history,” said Schcola Chambers of Miami, Florida, during August’s “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” Commitment March in Washington, D.C. “And [to] show my grandkids and their grandkids that this is love in action.”

FLINT, Michigan In January 2016, after investigative reports revealed that Flint’s water had for years carried dangerous levels of lead and other contaminants, photographer Wayne Lawrence documented residents’ struggles to find clean water and come to grips with their betrayal by public officials. Lawrence first saw the Abron siblings—Antonio, 13, and his sisters Julie and India, both 12—inside a firehouse, hoisting their daily allotment of the free bottles temporarily on offer. For the home-schooling family (their mother shopped thrift stores for uniforms), this was now the only available safe water for drinking, cooking, and bathing. Lawrence, remembering that bleak Flint visit: “It was just really heartbreaking, going to home after home and hearing the same horror stories.”

Iman Saleh, whose parents are from Yemen, is a journalism student at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Kamilah Munirah Bolling and Adil Justin Cole stand outside their home in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

Woodrow Vereen, Jr.'s two young sons were riding with him when he was stopped and searched by police for running a yellow light in Connecticut. He won a cash settlement after suing police over the illegal search and now struggles with what to tell his children about how to regard the police.

Siblings Julie, Antonio, and India Abron collect their daily allowance of bottled water from Fire Station #3. Located on Martin Luther King Avenue, it is one of five firehouses that have become water resource sites in Flint, Michigan.

In Flint, Michigan, siblings Julie, Antonio, and India Abram collect their daily allowance of bottled water from Fire Station #3, their local water resource site. This photo was originally published in "Intimate Portraits of Flint Show Frustration, Fear, Perseverance," in February 2016.