The iconography of social documentary photography was shaped by images
like Lange's mother and children in Nipomo, or Hine's garment worker
crossing New York's Battery Street, carrying a huge bale of sewing on
her head.
The photographs featured in this online exhibit, taken over the past
eight years, are part of a larger documentary project on immigration
and the lives of working people. I hope they contribute to the tradition
of social documentary photography - to expose social injustice, to reveal
the essential humanity of all working people and their effort to win
social change. They are a view from below, looking at the work process
and social protest from the point of view of the workers -- the participants
themselves. Their purpose is to help gain public understanding and support
for immigrant communities in the U.S, in an time of rising anti-immigrant
hysteria.
Immigrant workers are a big part of the workforce in jobs people take
for granted, but don't really see. They clean the linen from hotels and
restaurants patronized by millions, pick fruit for the tables of almost
every family, load cargo on and off ships plying the globe, and make
a million necessary articles of daily life. They do this work in conditions
determined more by their class than by their location.
Immigrants are far from being passive victims of economic and social
exploitation, however, although this is the image the media often projects.
People also struggle actively to change their conditions, a struggle
which influences life in our country profoundly. Yet this struggle is
largely undocumented.
This body of work, part of a larger documentary project, examines the
changing workplace and changing demographics in California, currents
of immigration and labor conditions in northern Mexico and the Pacific
Rim, the connections established by the global economy, and social protest
over these issues as they are experienced by working people. Sections
of the project have been exhibited in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los
Angeles, and Washington DC.
To see more of my work, please visit http://www.igc.org/dbacon/.
--David Bacon
All
photographs and stories by David Bacon © 1990-1999
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BIO:
David Bacon is a journalist and photographer based in the Bay Area.
He has documented child labor along the U.S./Mexican border and in the
Philippines for The Nation and the San Francisco Chronicle, the hardships
of field workers in California for the L.A. Weekly, strikes among industrial
workers in Los Angeles for Pacific News Service, and the political movements
in immigrant communities for many other publications. He travels frequently
to Mexico, Europe and the Phililppines. His work has been published widely
in the labor movement by America @ Work, Solidarity, California Teacher
and the Dispatcher, among other
publications.
His images have
been exhibited nationally in galleries, community centers, universities
and union halls. Recent exhibitions include "Mexican Workers" (sponsored
by the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights and the Zellerbach
Foundation), "Every Worker is an
Organizer" (a project on the United Farm Workers currently at the George Meany
Archives in Washington DC), and "Rebellion on the Border" (a documentary on the
upsurge of labor protest in the maquiladoras sponsored by the Service Employees
International Union). His images have also been
incorporated into "Faces Behind the Labels," a documentary project sponsored
by Sweatshop Watch.
For twenty-five years David Bacon was a Silicon Valley factory worker,
and a union organizer for the United Farm Workers, the United Electrical
Workers, the International Ladies' Garment Workers, and the Molders Unions.
Most of the unions to which he belonged were ones in which immigrants
were a big part of the workforce.
Today he serves on the boards of the Bay Area Media Alliance, the Northern
California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, and the Santa Clara Center
for Occupational Safety and Health.
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