Author : Richard Steven Street
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 15,58 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Photography
ISBN : 9780804740920
The work of nearly every photographer of consequence since the nineteenth century is captured in this collection of photographs of California farmworkers, raising moral questions about the exploitation and colonization of an entire class of people.
Author : Richard Steven Street
Publisher :
Page : 740 pages
File Size : 40,71 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN :
Deftly weaving the remarkable diversity of field photography into this story of labour activism, 'Everyone Had Cameras' establishes a new history of California photography while chronicling the impact that this visual medium has has on a vast, dispossessed class of American workers.
Author : Richard Steven Street
Publisher :
Page : 738 pages
File Size : 22,45 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Agricultural laborers
ISBN :
Deftly weaving the remarkable diversity of field photography into this story of labour activism, 'Everyone Had Cameras' establishes a new history of California photography while chronicling the impact that this visual medium has has on a vast, dispossessed class of American workers.
Author : Richard Steven Street
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 944 pages
File Size : 13,4 MB
Release : 2004
Category : History
ISBN : 9780804738804
Written by one of America's preeminent labor historians, this book is the definitive account of one of the most spectacular, captivating, complex and strangely neglected stories in Western history--the emergence of migratory farmworkers and the development of California agriculture. Street has systematically worked his way through a mountain of archival materials--more than 500 manuscript collections, scattered in 22 states, including Spain and Mexico--to follow the farmworker story from its beginnings on Spanish missions into the second decade of the twentieth century. The result is a comprehensive tour de force. Scene by scene, the epic narrative clarifies and breathes new life into a controversial and instructive saga long surrounded by myth, conjecture, and scholarly neglect. With its panoramic view spanning 144 years and moving from the US-Mexico border to Oregon, Beasts of the Field reveals diverse patterns of life and labor in the fields that varied among different crops, regions, time periods, and racial and ethic groups. Enormous in scope, packed with surprising twists and turns, and devastating in impact, this compelling, revelatory work of American social history will inform generations to come of the history of California and the nation.
Author : Curtis Marez
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 37,16 MB
Release : 2016-06-17
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1452951659
When we think of literature and film about farm workers, The Grapes of Wrath may come to mind, but Farm Worker Futurism reveals that the historical role of technology, especially new media, has in fact had much more to do with depicting the lives of farm laborers—Mexican migrants in particular—in the United States. From the late 1940s, when Ernesto Galarza led a strike in the San Joaquin Valley, to the early 1990s, when the United Farm Workers (UFW) helped organize a fast in solidarity with janitors at Apple Computers in the Santa Clara Valley, this book explores the friction between agribusiness and farm workers through the lens of visual culture. Marez looks at how the appropriation of photography, film, video, and other media technologies expressed a “farm worker futurism,” a set of farm worker social formations that faced off against corporate capitalism and government policies. In addition to drawing fascinating links between the worlds envisioned in UFW videos on the one hand and visions of Cold War geopolitics on the other, he demonstrates how union cameras and computer screens put the farm worker movement in dialogue with futurist thinking and speculative fictions of all sorts, including the films of George Lucas and the art of Ester Hernandez. Finally Marez examines the legacy of farm worker futurism in recent cinema and literature, contemporary struggles for immigrant rights, management–labor conflicts in computer hardware production, and the antiprison movement. In contrast with cultural histories of technology that take a top-down perspective, Farm Worker Futurism tells the story from below, showing how working-class people of color have often been early adopters and imaginative users of new media. In doing so, it presents a completely novel analysis of speculative fiction’s engagements with the farm worker movement in ways that illuminate both.
Author : Dolores Flamiano
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 40,9 MB
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Art
ISBN : 135153646X
The tension between social reform photography and photojournalism is examined through this study of the life and work of German ?gr?ansel Mieth (1909-1998), who made an unlikely journey from migrant farm worker to Life photographer. She was the second woman in that role, after Margaret Bourke-White. Unlike her colleagues, Mieth was a working-class reformer with a deep disdain for Life's conservatism and commercialism. In fact, her work often subverted Life's typical representations of women, workers, and minorities. Some of her most compelling photo essays used skillful visual storytelling to offer fresh views on controversial topics: birth control, vivisection, labor unions, and Japanese American internment during the Second World War. Her dual role as reformer and photojournalist made her a desirable commodity at Life in the late 1930s and early 40s, but this role became untenable in Cold War America, when her career was cut short. Today Mieth's life and photographs stand as compelling reminders of the vital yet overlooked role of immigrant women in twentieth-century photojournalism. Women, Workers, and Race in LIFE Magazine draws upon a rich array of primary sources, including Mieth's unpublished memoir, oral histories, and labor archives. The book seeks to unravel and understand the multi-layered, often contested stories of the photographer's life and work. It will be of interest to scholars of photography history, women's studies, visual culture, and media history.
Author :
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 22,3 MB
Release : 2021-12-21
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 0520380460
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Discourse about water and power in the modern era have largely focused on human power over water: who gets to own and control a limited resource that has incredible economic potential. As a result, discussion of water, even in the humanities, has traditionally focused on fresh water for human use. Today, climate extremes from drought to flooding are forcing humanities scholars to reimagine water discourse. This volume exemplifies how interdisciplinary cultural approaches can transform water conversations. The manuscript is organized into three emergent themes in water studies: agency of water, fluid identities, and cultural currencies. The first section deals with the properties of water and the ways in which water challenges human plans for control. The second section explores how water (or lack of it) shapes human collective and individual identities. The third engages notions of value and circulation to think about how water has been managed and employed for local, national, and international gains. Contributions come from preeminent as well as emerging voices across humanities fields including history, art history, philosophy, and science and technology studies. Part of a bigger goal for shaping the environmental humanities, the book broadens the concept of water to include not just water in oceans and rivers but also in pipes, ice floes, marshes, bottles, dams, and more. Each piece shows how humanities scholarship has world-changing potential to achieve more just water futures.
Author : Ellen Macfarlane
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 22,16 MB
Release : 2025-01-07
Category : Art
ISBN : 0520399765
In Politics Unseen, Ellen Macfarlane radically reframes the "pure photographs" of California art photography society Group f.64, known for depicting Western landscapes, fruits and vegetables, flowers, and faces. By foregrounding f.64 members’ and their prints’ alliances across commercial, political, and artistic domains, the book shatters entrenched understandings of the group as disinterested in contemporary events and unseats conceptions of its prints as icons of modernist purity. Instead, Politics Unseen argues the politics of f.64’s photographs become visible when interwar ideas about "purity" in the areas of eugenics, racial essence, nutrition, colonialism, and horticulture are interrogated. Ultimately, Politics Unseen alters perceptions not only of f.64, but also of what constituted a political image in 1930s America.
Author : Lloyd Daniel Barba
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 377 pages
File Size : 24,84 MB
Release : 2022
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0197516564
"Enter the religious landscape of California's industrial agriculture in the 1940s. Anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt's early 1940s reconnaissance tour of the social scene in the little town of Wasco offers us a composite picture of religious institutions in a typical industrial-ag town in the state. Anthropologists and sociologists of the time pointed to the proliferation of Pentecostal churches as evidence of industrial farming's undesirable social outcomes. In particular, they noted the enthusiastic and emotional expressions of Pentecostal services and how the recently dispossessed Dust Bowl or "Okie" migrants flocked into these churches. By the 1940s, Dorothea Lange's photograph of the Okie "Migrant Mother" capturing the pathos of white plight had surfaced and caught the national spotlight. California, many noted, had a migration problem, as many "undesirables" flooded into the state. Women such as the one captured in Lange's photograph "Revival Mother" standing and worshipping with eyes closed and raised hands in a makeshift garage church typified the poverty of Pentecostals described by the university researchers"--
Author : Richard Steven Street
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 459 pages
File Size : 31,23 MB
Release : 2013-10-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0803230486
Before the film, César Chavez, Chavez's life was depicted in photographs by his confidant, Jon Lewis. In the winter of 1966, twenty-eight-year-old ex-marine Jon Lewis visited Delano, California, the center of the California grape strike. He thought he might stay awhile, then resume studying photography at San Francisco State University. He stayed for two years, becoming the United Farm Workers Union’s semiofficial photographer and a close confidant of farmworker leader César Chávez. Surviving on a picket’s wage of five dollars a week, Lewis photographed twenty-four hours a day and created an insider’s view of the historic and sometimes violent confrontations, mass marches, fasts, picket lines, and boycotts that forced the table-grape industry to sign the first contracts with a farm workers union. Though some of his images were published contemporaneously, most remained unseen. Historian and photographer Richard Steven Street rescues Lewis from obscurity, allowing us for the first time to see a pivotal moment in civil rights history through the lens of a passionate photographer. A masterpiece of social documentary, this work is at once the biography of a photographer, an exposé of poverty and injustice, and a celebration of the human spirit.
