amateur category
Keep on Pushin' (Series)
DESCRIPTION
In the early Sixties I traveled up and down the Central Valley and into the Salinas Valley, going out into the fields and orchards, going to the camps along rivers and the settlements. I was covering the story of farm workers in California. It is a biased story -- I have tried to tell it with love for the spark of beauty which lies within each person and regard for the tracks they leave in their environment. Sometimes their raggedy shacks would glow with a special light. The real subject matter, even today, is the incredible strength that has allowed these people to survive an environment which continually questions their rights and frequently challenges their humanity.
AUTHOR
I documented California farm workers in photos and sound between 1960 and 1966 in the San Joaquin and Salinas Valleys of California. My photos document field and orchard work, farm worker communities and camps, family life, portraits, agribusiness infrastructure, and early unionization by Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) and the United Farm Workers/National Farmworkers Organization. The collection demonstrates the diversity of California's farm worker population: Anglo, Hispanic, Asian, and African-American.
Some unique content includes coverage of an Agricultural Workers Organizing Conference that led to restoration of AFL-CIO funding to AWOC; extensive documentation of African-American farm worker communities and family life not usually covered by other photographers; and photos of a controversial deYoung Museum multi-media exhibition almost cancelled in 1966 because of pressure on the Board. I returned to the Valley in 2015, finding and photographing many of the African-American subjects I'd documented in the 60s.
The Fresno Art Museum hosted Black Migrants a major exhibition of my African American photos from July thru December 2018. The show is at the Kooligian Libarary, University of California at Merced January 22 to April 4. The deYoung Museum, the San Francisco Museum, UC Berkeley Journalism School Gallery, and Santa Rosa Community College hosted
Some unique content includes coverage of an Agricultural Workers Organizing Conference that led to restoration of AFL-CIO funding to AWOC; extensive documentation of African-American farm worker communities and family life not usually covered by other photographers; and photos of a controversial deYoung Museum multi-media exhibition almost cancelled in 1966 because of pressure on the Board. I returned to the Valley in 2015, finding and photographing many of the African-American subjects I'd documented in the 60s.
The Fresno Art Museum hosted Black Migrants a major exhibition of my African American photos from July thru December 2018. The show is at the Kooligian Libarary, University of California at Merced January 22 to April 4. The deYoung Museum, the San Francisco Museum, UC Berkeley Journalism School Gallery, and Santa Rosa Community College hosted
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