1st place
gold star award
Richard Street
united states 
title
Knife Fight City
Huron doesn’t have a newspaper, Burger King, Little League, high school, Starbucks, or Chamber of Commerce. Huron lacks a lot of institutions most towns take for granted. Huron does have six labor camps, 7 bars, and three gangs.
Huron is off the beaten path. Reporters never venture here. Politics are bloody – one mayor had his automobile shot up by an AK-47; a councilwoman’s home was bombed; another mayor died in prison; the northeast and southwest corners of town are controlled by Norteño and Bulldog gangs.
Every spring and fall, when Huron produces 90 percent of the lettuce in the United States, the population doubles from 6,700 to nearly 14,000. Most field hands are single, transient, undocumented transient workers who follow the lettuce circuit. They live in bushes, boxcars, and camps surrounded by barbed wire-topped cyclone fences. Many don't even know exactly where they live, giving only a Post Office box and pointing towards a green trailer down an alley behind the auto repair shop.
In Huron poverty, fear, seasonal employment, dependence on successive waves of new immigrants, lack of stable institutions, oligarchy, massive police surveillance, and multiple layers of exploitation are compressed into an extreme example of what 350,000 farmworkers face in California every day – and 1.5 million farmworkers endure on farms from Washington to Florida. Yet no one in California – or anywhere else – seems to have the foggiest notion that such a place exists. Few other locations so completely nullify the California Dream.
In Knife Fight City I provoke a long-overdue debate over the geography of inequality by vividly illustrating a situation that defies verbal description.
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entry description
Knife Fight City explores an unacknowledged variety of American apartheid in Huron, where an American peasantry slaves for industrialized agriculture.Huron doesn’t have a newspaper, Burger King, Little League, high school, Starbucks, or Chamber of Commerce. Huron lacks a lot of institutions most towns take for granted. Huron does have six labor camps, 7 bars, and three gangs.
Huron is off the beaten path. Reporters never venture here. Politics are bloody – one mayor had his automobile shot up by an AK-47; a councilwoman’s home was bombed; another mayor died in prison; the northeast and southwest corners of town are controlled by Norteño and Bulldog gangs.
Every spring and fall, when Huron produces 90 percent of the lettuce in the United States, the population doubles from 6,700 to nearly 14,000. Most field hands are single, transient, undocumented transient workers who follow the lettuce circuit. They live in bushes, boxcars, and camps surrounded by barbed wire-topped cyclone fences. Many don't even know exactly where they live, giving only a Post Office box and pointing towards a green trailer down an alley behind the auto repair shop.
In Huron poverty, fear, seasonal employment, dependence on successive waves of new immigrants, lack of stable institutions, oligarchy, massive police surveillance, and multiple layers of exploitation are compressed into an extreme example of what 350,000 farmworkers face in California every day – and 1.5 million farmworkers endure on farms from Washington to Florida. Yet no one in California – or anywhere else – seems to have the foggiest notion that such a place exists. Few other locations so completely nullify the California Dream.
In Knife Fight City I provoke a long-overdue debate over the geography of inequality by vividly illustrating a situation that defies verbal description.
about the photographer
I m an academically-trained historian (Ph.D, University of Wisconsin)who became a photographer in order to submerge in the cointem,porary side of the field that is my special expertise. I cover all aspects of agriculture, defined broadly, big peaches to undocumented workers, with extended essays on the U.S.-Mexico border, farm labor, undocumented immigrants, organic agriculture, the United Farm Worker union, winemaking, farm communities, and pesticide poisoning. My goal is to carry on, extend, and amplify the work of Dorothea Lange, only in color, perhaps with a harder edge, often lit with strobes. My technique is that of the submergence/participant observer investigating people and places outside the realm of short-form newspaper coverage. I have been arrested a dozen times, once spent three days in the Yellow Prison in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and proudly listed these experiences on my CV until warned against it. I spent the academic year 2014-2015 at Princeton University as Anschutz Distinguished Professor teaching “Liberation Photography: The Engaged Photographer in the Age of Narcissism.”back to gallery
