Reporter-activist’s Chavez photos bolstered labor movement
George "Elfie" Ballis, 85, a reporter turned activist whose 30,000 photographs of labor leader Cesar Chavez and migrant farmworkers bolstered their struggle in the 1960s and 1970s to improve working and living conditions in the farm fields of California, died Sept. 24 at his home in Tollhouse, Calif. He had cancer.
In the 1950s, Mr. Ballis was an editor for a labor newspaper in California’s Central Valley when he took a seminar from acclaimed photographer Dorothea Lange, whose pictures had famously shown the effects of the Great Depression on the American poor.
He began photographing farmworkers, capturing their unimaginable difficulties – substandard housing, child labor and clouds of pesticides sprayed on workers with no protective equipment – as well as their strength and poise.
"I wanted my photographs to reflect to them the power and dignity they had," Mr. Ballis told the Fresno Bee in 2004.
In one of his most famous images, a barefoot boy jumps over a makeshift high bar he had built with an old car seat for a landing pit. Fists clenched, the boy appears to leap above his family’s shoddy shacks in the background.
Mr. Ballis documented Chavez’s effort to organize would would become the United Farm Workers union and win rights for Latino farmworkers. His photographs of protests, striking workers and marches appeared in The Washington Post and the New York Times as well as in Life magazine, Time and Newsweek.
The images humanized the struggle and helped the workers, who had been invisible to most Americans, win concessions from growers and support from leaders such as New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who made the welfare of the poor a central tenet of his 1968 presidential campaign.
Richard Steven Street, a scholar who has written several books on the farmworker movement, said Mr. Ballis was among a small group of freelance photographers whose images so affected public perception that Chavez might not have been successful without them.
"It was definitely activist photography with a point of view," Street said of Mr. Ballis’s work. "He knew what side he was on and he made no bones about it – he wanted his photographs to help the farmworker cause and to break through the veil that surrounds rural life."
Mr. Ballis went on to rattle some of California’s most powerful businessmen in 1976 when he took to the courts to shut off a spigot of cheap water flowing illegally to the state’s most powerful landowners.
The lawsuit brought by Mr. Ballis’s tiny grass-roots group, National Land for People, showed how the federal government had repeatedly violated a 1902 law that limited landowners to 160 acres of irrigated land.
For years, the government had looked the other way while growers ignored that law, amassing thousands of acres made arable with dams, canals and other water projects subsidized by the government. The subsidy going to California’s largest landowners amounted to millions of dollars a year originally meant for family farmers.
"The richest people in the country get welfare," Mr. Ballis told The Washington Post in 1980. "It is one of the most outrageous giveaways in the country’s history."
After a court ordered the government to either enforce the law or change it, a years-long fight in Congress ensued.
Ultimately, Mr. Ballis’s arguments were not enough to overcome powerful agricultural interests in Congress. An amended law, signed in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan, raised the limit to 960 acres and allowed unlimited leasing of additional land. When Interior Department officials traveled the West asking for input on how to implement the new rules, Mr. Ballis refused to take part.
"It’s like participating in a discussion of whether you’re going to be hung or shot," he told The Post.
Disgusted, Mr. Ballis withdrew from his efforts to wrest land from California’s powerful growers. With his wife, Maia, he founded the Sun Mountain Environmental Multimedia Center on 40 acres east of Fresno in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The nonprofit is devoted to testing and demonstrating energy conservation techniques.
George Ballis was born Aug. 12, 1925, and grew up in Faribault, Minn. He began calling himself "Elfie" as an adult, when a radio host said during an interview that he handled questions "with grace and lightness – like an elf."
He didn’t leave his home state until he joined the Marine Corps at 18.
After repairing torpedo bombers in the South Pacific during World War II, he graduated from the University of Minnesota. He then worked in a steel mill and a cheese factory before nearly taking a job with U.S. Rubber.
"They told me I had to have a U.S. Rubber attitude," he told the Bee in 2005. "I had to be ready to go anywhere at anytime. Obviously, I didn’t have the U.S. Rubber attitude."
He moved to Chicago to work as a reporter. Another westward migration to California two years later was accidental; he and his wife were vacationing in San Francisco when their car broke down. They decided to stay, and Mr. Ballis took a job writing headlines for the Wall Street Journal. Within months, his boss called him in for a talk about his creative phrases.
"I was having fun," Mr. Ballis said. "But the editor was saying, in effect, that I didn’t have the U.S. Rubber attitude."
His first marriage, to the former Martha Hall, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife of 38 years, Maia Johnson Ballis of Tollhouse, he is survived by two children from his first marriage, John Ballis of Sanger, Calif., and Valerie Airola of Fresno, Calif.; a sister; and six grandchildren.
In addition to founding and operating his environmental nonprofit group, he produced film and video documentaries, often with a left-leaning slant on events such as protests against the World Trade Organization and the Iraq War.
"I’m not a documentary photographer. I’m a movement photographer," he said in 1995. "I’m interested in the conditions only as they relate to the possibilities."