My Instagram feed is really about what I see a block, two blocks, five blocks away from
me.
I question homelessness, I question the way, stop and frisk, I question garbage in my community.
The folks I photograph make it difficult for me to leave them up on social media naked.
I think my caption is in attempt of putting clothes on them, putting a face on them.
This would be easy if I threw up an image for somebody to go, just another poor person,
just another bum.
And so I felt it was my responsibility to introduce the world to William Fraser Jr.
It took three paragraphs.
But I mean I remember my friend Ben asking me if I'm okay with being known as a black
photographer or an Instagram photographer.
I knew you were saying to me, dude, other people are looking at you and they're seeing
that most of your issues are just black and are you okay with editors seeing that and
maybe backing away.
I run the risk of being seen as the angry black man.
I don't think I have a choice to do what I'm doing on Instagram.
Being in this industry for 15 years and feeling like I've been overlooked sometimes and I'm
like, why?
I mean I would question why.
And so for years I felt like, okay, this is going to be my lot in life.
I'm going to be invisible.
And so going out and meeting these homeless guys, sitting down talking to them and having
their story in a way mimic my feelings, it became easier to find some sense of similarity,
familyarity, camaraderie.
I lost maybe a good 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 people just because of the format I used, which is
long captions.
I've gone wider and deeper into things that are not popular and on a day-to-day basis I
see people dropping off.
And it could just be the nature of Instagram, but I also know that they're editors who use
the follow me that don't follow me anymore.
What gives me solace right now is the fact that I get emails regularly from, and I can
freely say, white folks who said, I've always seen the guy pass my block, picking up cans.
I've never looked at him.
And your feed now forces me to look at him.
But I think there's so much more that I wish the pictures could assist in changing.
