Artist's Lordstown photos are a call to action — 'The workers are the heroes'

LaToya Ruby Frazier's initial encounter with General Motors involved water, not cars.

About five years ago, GM was first to complain that corrosion, caused by high levels of chloride in the Flint water, was rusting engine blocks at its Flint Engine Operations.

"They were immediately shifted off the Flint River to the Flint township water, which was not contaminated," said Frazier, an artist and professor of photography associated with the Art Institute of Chicago who was a 2015 MacArthur fellow. "It made me realize that corporations have access to more basic human rights than people do."

Frazier spent four years in Flint photographing the impact of the bad water on its residents' health.

GM would get her attention again on Nov. 26, 2018. That day, GM said it would cease operations at five of its plants in North America. 

"My heart dropped. I immediately became very concerned for those workers and their families," Frazier said. "I felt it was my duty and obligation to be there for the workers."

Ohio plant:GM sells its Lordstown Assembly factory to electric truck start-up

Frazier did just that, spending nine months in Lordstown, Ohio, photo-documenting GM's closure of its Lordstown Assembly plant — which GM sold Thursday to an electric truck start-up.

GM did not cooperate with her, but she still managed to capture 67 evocative photos of UAW members that reveal how their lives were forever altered when the last Chevrolet Cruze car rolled off the line in March and GM shut the doors to the plant.

The photos are part of an exhibit called "The Last Cruze" at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. It runs through Dec. 1. Next, it goes to the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. 

Frazier's ultimate goal is to bring the exhibit to the Motor City, in part because of the rich history of union activism and civil rights here.

"Artists function best at keeping history alive," said Frazier. "This (Lordstown) exhibit is a monument, a testament and a memorial to Lordstown, to UAW Local 1112 and to the United Auto Workers' legacy."

Steel mill next door

Frazier, 37, knows a lot about the power of corporations, the importance of factories to communities' financial bases and the working man.

She was born and raised in Braddock, Pennsylvania, about nine miles east of Pittsburgh. Braddock was supported by the steel industry until the late 1970s and early '80s, when the industry began to crumble. 

Frazier came of age amid the industrial decline around her. She grew up poor in the Talbot Towers projects located next to the Edgar Thomson Steel Works factory.

Life next door to the factory made her and her family sick, she said. But in the 1990s, she went to live with her grandmother a couple blocks away from the projects. She was still in the shadow of the steel factory, but she blossomed in her grandmother's care.

"My grandmother taught me to bring home straight A's and instilled in me that education was my way out of poverty," said Frazier.

By age 6, Frazier played the guitar, she said. Soon after that, she learned to play the viola. By her teens, she was interested in plays and the theater.

"My grandmother was the one who supported me in the arts," said Frazier.

Along the way Frazier developed an empathy toward factory workers. Her step great-grandfather, whom she called Gramps, worked at Edgar Thomson Steel Works. He was one of the few black men to retire with a pension. She and her grandmother took care of him until he died in 2004, at age 95, in his bedroom on Thanksgiving day. 

"It deeply impacted my life," said Frazier, who wrote about it in her book "The Notion of Family." "To watch a steel mill worker die at home was a rather harsh reality and it taught me about the inevitability of death and also how corporations discard our bodies, and how our elderly care systems have failed us."

On an academic scholarship to Edinboro University in Pennsylvania, Frazier met her mentor Kathe Kowalski, a professor and a feminist version of Frazier's grandmother.

"She had taught me how to take photographs that make a social commentary on a real economic or political situation," Frazier said.

After graduating from Edinboro, Frazier got a master's from Syracuse University in 2007. Now she is a professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Her art exhibits reflect her past, and they definitely have a point a view: "In my photos, the workers are all heroes."

Centered on family

Two weeks after GM announced its intention to idle the five factories, Frazier called The New York Times asking if it would want photos around the shutdown of Lordstown.

She wanted to get the story on a "major platform to change GM's position." Plus, she hoped the Times could convince GM to let her inside the plant. The newspaper agreed to partner with her, but even it could not sway GM to open the plant doors.

Asked why GM declined to allow Frazier to photograph the plant, GM spokesman David Barnas said, “Our focus has remained on the impacted employees and our commitment to future investment and job growth in Mahoning Valley and the state of Ohio.” 

So Frazier next approached the union. In early February, she met with Dave Green, then president of UAW Local 1112 in Lordstown. Green said he was inundated with media requests centered on the politics and business impact of closing the plant. But Frazier's request stood out, he said.

"Once I spoke to her and actually Googled her and saw the work she’s done I was taken aback," said Green. "She was trying to tell a story that mainstream media didn’t want to talk about, and that’s the personal side" of a plant closure.

Green, 49, took the idea of having her photograph and tell their stories to membership for a vote. The members agreed to let Frazier into the union hall and its meetings.

Family soon became the theme of her photo essay, she said. The workers in the plant viewed each other as a family on the assembly line. At the union hall, the UAW members called each other union brothers and sisters. Finally, there were the workers' real families in their homes.

"That's how I visually navigated it, with exteriors of the plant, then photos at the union hall, then after GM idled the plant, they were home with their loved ones expressing that uncertainty," Frazier said. 

Frazier insinuated herself into the union members' lives, some times for a couple of hours, other times for up to 10 hours, talking and taking pictures.

"To say it’s not an intrusion on your life is an understatement," said Green. "She came to my parents’ house, with my kids and she was there for six hours. But everybody welcomed her. I chose to let her in. I felt it was important to tell our story.”

Dreaded FedEx

Around spring 2018, FedEx trucks became a feared sight in the Lordstown neighborhoods.

GM used FedEx to deliver the letters notifying workers to which plants they had to transfer if they wanted to stay employed. Workers with the highest seniority were offered GM's Arlington Assembly in Texas in the beginning. Upon receipt of a letter, a worker had four days to decide to move to Texas or lose their job.

"There's one thing about being present as an artist and another thing to be present as a human being," said Frazier. "These people were in crisis, I wanted to be there for them. Being an eyewitness is seeing people go into a state of panic when a FedEx truck was coming down the street. It caused stress and anxiety. These trucks would come at all hours and possibly have a 'forced letter' on board."

GM's Barnas said that in the end about 1,400 Lordstown workers accepted transfers to other facilities and the company paid up to $30,000 in relocation assistance. Those who chose to not transfer have since been offered buyouts of up to $75,000. Retirement-eligible employees, including those who transferred, can get at least $75,000 if they opt to retire. 

Vickie Raymond, 50, had 24 years at Lordstown. She feared being transferred to Texas, but she also didn't want to quit and risk losing her pension. Plus, Raymond came from a GM family. Her father worked at Lordstown and retired from it in 1999, she said. 

Raymond had just returned from a six-month unpaid leave of absence caring for her terminally ill mother when, at about 9:30 a.m. Nov. 26, the plant manager called a brief meeting and told the 1,600 workers that GM was not going to allocate new product to the plant.

"I didn’t know what that meant. When they said 'unallocated,' we all looked at each other like what’s that mean," said Raymond. "They wouldn’t say they were closing the doors, but our supervisors said that’s what it means. It was a state of shock. I mean 24 years and you get pulled into a couple-minute long meeting..." she trailed off to silence.

Power of art

Raymond was sleeping on her mother's couch helping with in-home hospice care, and she said news of the plant closing further traumatized her mother.

"She worried about me and me taking care of her. She thought that she was holding me back and she said, ‘If you need to transfer, go,'" said Raymond. "It was something that, in her situation, she shouldn’t have had to think about.”

Raymond used what vacation time she had left to care for her mother until she died on Jan. 22. 

About a month later, Raymond said she met Frazier at a union hall meeting. The two struck an instant and deep connection over shared loss.

“We clicked like I knew her forever. She was going through a similar situation with family and illness," said Raymond. "I’m not one for interviews or to be photographed — there are very few pictures of me even in the family — but I felt I’m going to voice my opinion on this matter and tell my story.”

Raymond, who moved to Kentucky in September and now works at GM's Bowling Green Assembly Plant, wanted her nieces to know her story and the union's fight. She worries that unions will one day be gone. Also, Raymond wanted people to see "the humanity side of what these corporations do to people.”

For Frazier, Raymond's story was the most heart-wrenching and personal of many she heard because of Frazier's own grief over the loss of her grandmother and other loved ones to terminal illness.

"It struck me in a deep, profound way," said Frazier, who photographed Raymond sitting on the bed and recliner that her mother sat on in her final days. "I never had the opportunity to grieve my grandmother's passing. To encounter a woman in northeast Ohio who never had the opportunity to grieve the loss of her mother, we were two strangers grieving and making photographs. We understood each other's humanity. That's the power of art."

A call to action

Frazier's photo series and story ran on May 6 in the Money section of The New York Times.

"I thought maybe (GM CEO) Mary Barra would see the photo essay and rethink what she's doing and give them a product," said Frazier. "She'd see the people behind the political economic decision. You have to hold onto hope."

But on Oct. 25, after a 40-day nationwide strike, the UAW members ratified a new four-year contract that did not include a new vehicle for Lordstown to build.

In addition to selling the plant to an investment group backed by electric truck maker Workhorse, GM said it has plans to build a battery cell manufacturing facility near Lordstown that could create about 1,000 jobs.

More:Strike over! UAW workers ratify contract with GM. Here's what's next

More:GM UAW workers ponder the point of the strike in light of Ford's deal

"The Last Cruze" exhibit opened Sept. 14, the day GM's 2015 contract expired at midnight. Scheduling it that day was deliberate, said Frazier.

"I was in solidarity with the autoworkers," Frazier said. "My goal was to keep their story out there and keep people talking about them."

Dave Green was at the opening of "The Last Cruze," and it hit him hard.

“I became too emotional to look at the faces. I had to step out,” said Green. “There was a lot more hope in the beginning and knowing the outcome and seeing how some of those people did not fare very well. Others were OK. But the hope was gone."

Raymond has not seen the exhibit yet, which has had about 2,000 visitors since it opened, said the associate curator at The Renaissance Society in Chicago.

Raymond said she's still in disbelief that Lordstown shuttered and she's living far from her brothers and nieces.

“It felt like a death to me," said Raymond. "For a lot of us, it felt that way."

Frazier doesn't know where the exhibit will go after the Wexner Center in Columbus. But she said it will never be packed up and put away.

"This is about memory, art and education," said Frazier. "The reason I want it to go to Detroit is because that's where we got our middle class. The reason I want this show to travel is because it teaches the importance of unions. This exhibit is a call to action for all people to unite."

Contact Jamie L. LaReau at 313-222-2149 or jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletter.