At California State Railroad Museum, photo exhibit focuses on the humanity of agriculture

By Dixie Reid
dreid@sacbee.com  

Rick Nahmias has a documentarian’s eye for society’s fringe – the forgotten, the invisible, the underserved, the overlooked. The Southern California photographer captured a transgender gospel choir in San Francisco and Zen Buddhists in San Quentin State Prison, among other marginalized groups, to see how they find faith and sanctuary in a small community. His book "Golden States of Grace" will be out this fall.

And in New York’s Catskill Mountains, he chronicled on film the final years of a bungalow colony exclusive to Holocaust survivors. "Last Days of the Four Seasons," will be published in April 2011. His curiosity about the human cost of our food prompted his most ambitious undertaking to date, a book and photography exhibition called "The Migrant Project: Contemporary California Farm Workers. 

"Nahmias (pronounced nuh-MY-us) set out in 2002 to learn something about the 650,000 men, women and children – many of them undocumented – who gather the state’s bounty of fruit and vegetables. They work in sometimes deadly heat to harvest nearly half the produce consumed in this country.

Forty of his stunning black-and-white photographs are on display inside a 1920s refrigerated produce car, and on the adjoining platform, through June 21 at the California State Railroad Museum.

Forty of his stunning black-and-white photographs are on display inside a 1920s refrigerated produce car, and on the adjoining platform, through June 21 at the California State Railroad Museum.

"It’s a perfect fit for us," says Cathy Taylor, superintendent of Capital District State Museums and Historic Parks. "One of the reasons California agriculture became big business was the delivery system of the railroad."

Four California farm workers died of heat-related causes in 2005. As a result, California became the first state to enact emergency heat regulations to protect outdoor workers. Even so, three summers later, six farm laborers died after working outdoors.Nahmias hit the road in March 2002. He remembers being nervous as he drove from his Beverly Hills apartment to a farm near Ventura, wondering how he would be received.

"A middle-class white male coming with a camera into the farm fields of California is a very threatening thing," he says. "I knew that from the moment I decided to buy film."

The initial outing went well, even though he speaks little Spanish, so he plunged into the project, traveling 4,000 miles around California over the next five months.

He found migrant workers in such places as Thermal, Oasis and Mecca, in Tracy, Stockton and Delano. Some were living in squalid quarters that smelled of raw sewage, or under bridges.  He captured the faces of their children, their muddy field boots, even their scars. Manuel Llamas’ damaged leg had been pinned under a truck at a cherry-packing house. In a potter’s field in Holtville, he found the grave of an unknown farm worker. "No olvidado" ("Not forgotten") was stenciled on the plain white cross."If there is one thing I hope people take away from this work is that these are human beings – mostly Hispanic, but there are other ethnicities – who have lives and families like all of us," Nahmias says. "And they deserve our respect for the work they’re doing."

"A lot of people want to throw in the immigration card, and I’m happy to talk about it, but this is a food and human issue. Show me anyone else who, even in this economy, is willing to go out there and do this physical labor."

"A lot of people want to throw in the immigration card, and I’m happy to talk about it, but this is a food and human issue. Show me anyone else who, even in this economy, is willing to go out there and do this physical labor."

He has no expectation that "The Migrant Project" will lead to change but would be happy if consumers begin to question the source of their produce and the treatment of workers who harvested it.

Last year, he founded the nonprofit Food Forward, which has 1,000 volunteers in the Los Angeles area harvesting excess fruit from entire orchards, or a single tree, and distributing it to the hungry.  "It grew out of an attempt to reconnect with the abundance of Los Angeles and what I saw going to waste," says Nahmias, who now lives in the San Fernando Valley.

He will be at the California State Railroad Museum on March 27 for a lecture and book signing in the morning; a panel discussion will be held in the afternoon.

"Rick was respectful of his subjects, and the photographs show you humanity and the plight of these workers," says Taylor. "It’s a subject Californians should care about, and when you leave the museum on March 27, you will know what you can do in your own life to make a difference."

Sacramento was the site of Nahmias’ final photograph for "The Migrant Project."  As he looked through hundreds of images, it occurred to him that the story had no ending, no proper closing salvo. Then he heard that Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers union with the late Cesar Chavez, would lead a 165-mile march from Merced to the Capitol.

So he was here on Aug. 25, 2002, when 5,000 migrant laborers and their supporters demonstrated, urging Gov. Grey Davis to approve Senate Bill 1736. (A landmark compromise bill he signed the following month greatly strengthened workers’ rights.)  On that hot August day, Nahmias photographed Huerta (who later wrote the foreword to "The Migrant Project" book) front-and-center in a crowd of people waving flags, hand-painted signs and white crosses. Someone held aloft a photo of Chavez, who first organized California’s farm workers in 1962.

Nahmias says of the photo:  "I like the image for its hopefulness and the sense of bringing ownership of change back to the grassroots level. The light, and the image of Chavez floating in the background, were a gift. … The experience felt like a perfect bookend to a nearly year-long journey."

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