honorable mention
Richard Street united states
title
In the Fields
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entry description
These images are the concluding chapter in a modern visual history of farm labor in California since 1975. They attack the immense advertising system’s facade by reconstructing varieties of labor in the fields. My goal is to underscore the extent to which fruit and vegetable production rests on a class of landless peasants (although we never reefer to them with such charged terms) and an American variant of apartheid. Through these images we shake hands not only with people of color and immigrants moving north from Mexico and Central America, but with those traveling east from China, India, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia. Watching 350,000 people pouring their sweat and blood into the fields, we sometimes sense that we have stepped directly into kind of modern analog to a Charles Dickens epic. Appearing at the drop of a hat, dismissed with the flick of a finger, and employed in a glutted labor market, California farm workers are channeled through the landscape as routinely as if sending irrigation water down the furrows of a field.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