GETTING PAST THE ICON -- SHOULD PHOTOGRAPHERS 
DEPICT REALITY, OR TRY TO CHANGE IT?
By David Bacon
afterimage, the journal of media arts and cultural criticism, vol. 40, no. 6
http://vsw.org/afterimage/issues/afterimage-vol-40-no-6/

This Light of Ours:  Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement
Edited by Leslie G. Kelen
University Press of Mississippi, 2011
Copublished with The Center for Documentary Expression and Art
251pp,/$45.00

Photography in Mexico
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco, CA
March 10 - July 8, 2012


Can photographers be participants in the social 
events they document?  Eighty years ago the 
question would have seemed irrelevant in the 
political upsurges of the 1930s, in both Mexico 
and the United States.  Many photographers were 
political activists, and saw their work 
intimately connected to workers strikes, 
political revolution or the movements for 
indigenous rights.

Today what was an obvious link is often viewed as 
a dangerous conflict of interest.  Politics 
compromise art.  Photographers must be objective 
and neutral, or at least stand at a distance from 
the reality they record on film or the compact 
flash card.

Now a book and a recent exhibition have provided 
both images and the narrative experiences of 
photographers that should reopen this debate.  
This Light of Ours, Activist Photographers of the 
Civil Rights Movement, was published recently by 
the University Press of Mississippi, and the 
exhibition, Photography in Mexico, ran at the San 
Francisco Museum of Modern Art last year.

The book and exhibit share a common discourse 
about the relation between documentary 
photographers and social movements.  The book is 
an intensive look at the photographers of just 
one movement -- the civil rights movement in the 
U.S. south during the 1960s.  The exhibit 
highlights the changing relationship between 
photographers and Mexico's social movements from 
the Revolution to the present.

This Light of Ours is a beautiful collection of 
almost 200 black and white photographs, duo toned 
and reproduced in extraordinary brilliance.  They 
were taken, not by mainstream media photographers 
who visited the south during the most intense 
moments of the upheaval of the 1960s, but by 
photographers who worked as part of the civil 
rights movement itself, especially the Student 
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.  Interviews 
with six of the nine photographers follow the 
photographs.

Bob Fitch, who went on to document the farm 
worker movement in California after his years in 
the south, captures the perspective shared by 
these civil rights photographers and the impact 
the movement made on their lives.  ""I did 
various kinds of organizing for the balance of my 
life and photographed those activities as I went 
through," he says in his interview.  "And I 
perceived myself as an organizer who uses a 
camera to tell the story of my work, which is 
true today."1



Ed Fondren, 104 years old, Bob Fitch, Batesville, Mississippi, 1966

To Fitch, work as a photographer springs from his 
work as an organizer.  Both are a means to fight 
for social and racial justice.  Because he's an 
organizer, he's there when friends carry El 
Fondren, 104 years old, from the courthouse after 
registering to vote (an act which cost people 
their lives in Mississippi at the time).  Fitch's 
quick eye frames Fondren between two hands about 
to clap in celebration, with other hands reaching 
up.  Like all the photos in the book, it's a 
document of a critical historical moment, and at 
the same time an inspiration to other Black 
farmers to go down to the courthouse.  It is also 
a beautiful image.2

Fitch's organizer's perspective does not make him 
less of a photographer.  His portrait of Cesar 
Chavez was used for the U.S. postage stamp.  His 
image of Dorothy Day surrounded by helmeted 
sheriffs during the Coachella grape strike became 
one of the best-known photographs of the early 
years of the United Farm Workers.  But Fitch's 
perspective puts him at odds with that taught in 
journalism schools and practiced in the 
mainstream media.  Photographers today are 
expected to be "objective" observers of events, 
not active participants in them. In fact, 
participation in marches or demonstrations is 
held to so compromise a photographer that it is 
grounds for discharge at newspapers like the New 
York Times or Washington Post. 

Matt Herron, one of the best-known photographers 
in the book, describes three goals for his work 
as a SNCC photographer:  "I was a budding 
photojournalist, that was foremost, and that was 
how I was gonna support the family," he 
remembers.  "I was also a propagandist for the 
movement.  When movement people wanted pictures I 
did it and they used them...I wanted to do social 
documentary work on the way of life that was 
southern, both black and white, and to try and 
document this weird culture that we'd thrust 
ourselves into."3



Black labor maintained white privelege, Matt Herron, Jackson, Mississippi, 1963

Herron's photograph of a Black man clipping the 
lawn in front of a ante-bellum style mansion in 
Jackson serves all three purposes.  In one image 
it captures the class and race relations of the 
south.  The juxtaposition of the gardener below 
and the rich family above, in a composition in 
which the man is large and detailed enough to be 
real as a person, but is dwarfed by lawn and 
house, is a visual indictment of the lack of 
social equality and justice.  The book doesn't 
say if this image was sold, helping to make a 
living for his family, but Herron did have a long 
career as a photojournalist after his years in 
the south. 

Documentary photographers today still struggle 
with their relationship to the communities and 
movements they document, and their need to make a 
living.  His self-description probably sounds 
very familiar to many young photographers around 
the Occupy protests, who consider themselves 
activist photojournalists -- simultaneously 
participants and documentarians.

The work of photographers like Fitch, Herron and 
their fellow civil rights activists gains visual 
and emotional power from their closeness to the 
movement they document.  They are not 
"objective," but partisan.  For them, the 
documentation of social reality is part of the 
movement for social change.  George Ballis, 
another photographer who went from the south to 
California to document the early years of the 
farm workers movement, explains that closeness: 
"Well, it's one thing to talk about people in a 
condition; it's another thing to look somebody in 
the eye.  When I did that, I saw me, I saw we.  I 
didn't see them any more. I saw us.  So I'm not 
working on their issues, I'm working on our 
issues.  We're all in this together, whether it's 
farm labor conditions or civil rights or gay 
marriages or the conditions of the steelworkers, 
it's us."4



MFDP demonstrations, George Ballis, Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1964

During the Democratic Party convention that 
refused to seat the movement-organized 
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, most press 
photographers shot the scenes in the hall where 
the confrontation took place.  So did Ballis. 
But because he was part of the movement, later 
that night he was with the activists from the 
south as they held aloft a casket on the Atlantic 
City boardwalk, symbolizing the Klan murders of 
civil rights workers Goodwin, Schwerner and 
Chaney.  Ballis shows the price paid for voting 
rights at the very moment when those rights are 
being denied.  His ability as a photographer to 
take this nighttime image, using available light 
and no flash, renders the drama even more intense.

Julian Bond writes in the introduction, "Uniquely 
among its civil rights organizational 
contemporaries, SNCC employed photographers, 
stocked darkrooms in Atlanta, Georgia and 
Tougaloo, Mississippi, sent photographers to 
train with famed photographer Richard Avedon [!], 
employed photography in exceptional ways, and 
produced photographers who are distinguished in 
the field today...SNCC's idea of photography was 
functional; it was to provide pictures for SNCC 
propaganda.  Our photographers made it art."5 



Summer volunteer Jim Nance, Herbert Randall, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, 1964

Some images, like Randall's portrait of summer 
volunteer Jim Nance striding up a railroad track 
past the "shotgun" houses of Hattiesburg's Black 
community, is art and documentation both, as Bond 
says.  The dynamism of the composition, using the 
perspective lines of tracks and houses to frame 
the walking man, give it emotional force.  Nance, 
with his folders in his hand, is walking into a 
future he's determined to create, as the 
neighbors look on.

Maria Varela says, "I never considered myself an 
artist...I had a job to do, and I couldn't afford 
the luxury of being an artist...But there was a 
reason I was shooting in the first place...And 
basically the theory behind my shooting was these 
are strong beautiful people that are not seen in 
this country.  They are not paid attention to. 
They are not icon material, you know, but here 
they are."  Not exactly what you learn in the 
photojournalism class where the pursuit of the 
icon, the completely self-referential image, is 
defined as the goal that protects the 
photographer's "objectivity."  Varela says, "I 
knew you not only had to use the words of local 
people about how they did something, you had to 
also use pictures showing them taking leadership 
roles in their own communities."6

These photographs helped set the politics of the 
time - they created cultural ideas that still 
define for us what this social movement and its 
era were about.  None perhaps more than that of 
the fire hoses turned on demonstrators, captured 
by Bob Adelman in Birmingham in 1963.  The 
image's simplicity - the huge fury of the water 
shooting across the entire frame, and the people 
hit by it in one corner - gives it tremendous 
visual energy and power. 



In Birmingham the use of firehoses and dogs 
backfired, Bob Adelman, Kelly Ingram Park, 
Birmingham, Alabama, 1963

These images and the interviews tell us a great 
deal about the relationship between the 
photographer and the reality she or he is 
documenting.  By the end of the book we 
understand the way an activist photographer 
functions, and the motivation for doing this 
work.  The photographer has to balance the 
tension between producing an image that "works" 
-- that uses composition, lighting and visual 
techniques to create an image that resonates in 
the mind and emotions of the viewer -- and at the 
same time produce an image that has is useful to 
the movement the photographer is trying to serve.

By presenting both the images and narratives, the 
book gives this work historical context.  The 
civil rights movement helped rescue 
socially-committed photography from the long 
suffocating effects of the Cold War.  The 
photographs not only documented a movement that 
helped to break the hold of the Cold War on this 
country's politics, but were taken by 
photographers who recovered the tradition of 
social activism in photography of the 1930s and 
early 1940s.

Compare them, for instance, with two photographs 
taken by Otto Hegel and Hansel Mieth, activist 
photographers connected with the movements of 
dock workers and farm laborers in the 1930s in 
California.  These two fled Germany as the Nazis 
gained power, and took their cameras into the 
huge cotton strike of 1933, and then the west 
coast waterfront strike of 1934.  Dorothea Lange, 
shooting during the same period in the same area, 
saw herself as a documentarian of social 
conditions.  Hegel and Mieth saw themselves as 
part of the movements and communities they were 
documenting, in the way that Ballis later 
described.

In one image, taking during a farm labor strike 
in California's central valley, Hegel and Mieth 
use available light at night to dramatic effect, 
as Ballis did in Atlantic City.7  The image of 
the speaker is lit by headlights in the upper 
corner, while the men listening lean on a car or 
stand with hands in their pockets.  The lighting 
and composition make it plain that the meeting is 
clandestine.  In this era, growers used shotguns 
and terror to suppress union organizing and 
strikes.  The photograph was possible only 
because the two were activists in the movement 
themselves, knew where the meeting was taking 
place, and were trusted enough that workers let 
them take the photograph.



Night Strike Meeting at the Crossroads, Hansel 
Mieth and Otto Hegel, San Joaquin Valley, 
California, 1936

One of the best known of Mieth's images from the 
1930s showed the shapeup in which workers were 
hired to unload ships on the waterfront.8  At the 
top of the image, a man is at the window, his 
face is in shadow.  He is the foreman who 
controls the jobs.  In front, massed in the lower 
part of the image, dozens of men reach out their 
hands.  You can almost hear them calling out - 
"choose me, choose me!"  Anyone who's seen day 
laborers cluster around a contractor's pickup 
truck in front of Home Depot knows this scene is 
as heart rending today as it was in the 30s. 



Outstretched Hands, Hansel Mieth, San Francisco, California, 1934

Mieth's photograph was not just a document.  It 
became a symbol to the workers of the humiliating 
conditions they wanted to end, as they launched 
what became the San Francisco general strike.  It 
was an appeal to join the union, go on strike, 
and end the shapeup on the docks forever, much 
like Herron's photograph of the gardener below 
the mansion urged people to protest racism and 
inequality.  Perhaps it's a testament to this 
image's power that longshore workers on the 
Pacific Coast have had a union hiring hall, and 
no shapeup, ever since the end of that strike.

Photographers in Mexico also dealt with the same 
set of choices.  The histories of U.S. and 
Mexican photography, and of our social movements, 
share important parallels. There a political 
environment grew more conservative also, limiting 
the development of social documentary 
photography, much as it did in the U.S. during 
the same years.  The Photography in Mexico show 
presents an historical overview, illuminating the 
way the politically-inspired photography of the 
1920s and 30s became less directly connected with 
that country's movements for social change. 
However in Mexico as well, the movements of the 
1960s, and more recent ones connected to 
displacement and migration, are reforging that 
connection.

Mexico's social documentary photography begins 
before the show's purview, with Agustin 
Casasola's photographs of the Revolution.  While 
many showed the soldiers and the conflict, some 
served to illuminate starkly the source of the 
conflict.  One of his most famous shows the 
Zapatista peasant soldiers eating in the fancy 
Sanborn's restaurant, served by waitresses in 
aprons more accustomed to attending to Mexico 
City's wealthy.9  The revolution upended the old 
social order, and humble lost their humility and 
took their place at the counter of the rich, who 
in the photograph are nowhere in sight.  Casasola 
didn't really view himself at the time as a 
partisan of one side, but his understanding of 
the Revolution's social causes gave him the 
insight producing the image.



Peasant Zapatistas, members of a Mexican 
insurgent group, are fed breakfast at the famous 
restaurant Sanborns, Agustin Casasola, Mexico 
City, 1914.

The show starts in the two decades immediately 
after the Revolution -- the same period in which 
U.S. photographers produced some of the 
best-known social documentary work -- the period 
of the New York Photo League and the Farm 
Security Administration.  It began with a 
rejection of earlier photographic trends that 
depicted Mexico as a land of "exotic" indigenous 
people, or concentrated on a European 
pictorialist style.  The modernist critique 
advanced when Edward Weston and Tina Modotti 
arrived during the early 1920s, and Modotti in 
particular allied herself with the radical 
muralists Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros and Jose 
Clemente Orozco.  Modotti was actually born in 
Italy and raised in San Francisco. In Mexico City 
she pulled herself out of Weston's shadow, and 
became much more overtly political, putting her 
photography at the service of the Mexican 
Communist Party and the country's then-leftwing 
government. 



  Mexican sombrero with hammer and sickle, Tina Modotti, Mexico City, 1927

While she produced a body of documentary work, 
she also took photographs specifically intended 
to advance her goal of inspiring leftwing 
political consciousness, and connecting it to 
Mexican nationalism, which was being redefined in 
the postrevolutionary years.  In one image, she 
marries the traditional Communist hammer and 
sickle to a sombrero like those worn by the 
Zapatistas, almost saying that the ideology is, 
or can be, Mexican.



Bandolier, corn, guitar, Tina Modotti, Mexico City, 1927

Next she abandons the hammer and sickle 
themselves, and produces an image using Mexican 
cultural and revolutionary symbols - the ear of 
corn, the guitar, and the bandolier.  Both images 
show her deep knowledge and mastery of 
photographic technique.  Modotti eventually 
defied the modern paradigm that would have 
activists give up their politics to pursue their 
art, by giving up photography entirely, and going 
to Spain during the Spanish Civil War to evacuate 
the refugees of fascism.

The show continues with the photographs of Manuel 
Alvarez Bravo, who became a photographer during 
the cultural and political ferment in which 
Modotti was active.  The exhibition including his 
"Death of a Striker," showing the violence of the 
social turmoil of the time,10 but Alvarez Bravo 
was not a political militant or 
activist/photographer as Modotti was. In a long 
career he combined documentary work, surrealism, 
nude photography and other genres.  His first 
wife, Lola Alvarez Bravo, also became a pioneer 
documenting the country's indigenous cultural 
roots, using a realist style to combat 
"exoticism".

Another U.S.-born photographer who spent her life 
in Mexico, and became an important figure in 
Mexican graphic arts and photography was Mariana 
Yampolsky.  She became the first woman in the 
Taller de Grafica Popular (the People's Graphic 
Workshop), an anti-fascist project started in the 
late 1930s by Leopoldo Méndez, Pablo O'Higgins 
and Luis Arena. 

Yampolsky was a socialist, close to the Mexican 
Communist Party, and worked for many years with 
the Secretariat of Public Education, during the 
period when it was staffed by progressive 
educators dedicated to bringing schools and 
literacy to rural, especially indigenous areas. 
One print of a fat man squeezing blood from a 
worker is titled "Monopoly knows how to squeeze 
the last cent from the worker."11  She published 
art and children's' books, including textbooks 
for schools, and documented life in indigenous 
communities in a realist style, influencing 
Graciela Iturbide and Flor Garduño. 



Martel, Mariana Yampolsky, Mexico,  1968

One of the most well-known photographs in this 
exhibition, Martel, shows a disused railway 
state, half a railroad car, empty tracks leading 
to nothing in the distance.12  The composition 
has the strong graphic elements that show her 
skill as a printmaker, paring reality down to 
just a few stark elements.  It dates from the 
years when passenger rail service still existed 
in Mexico, long since gone, yet it is evocative 
of the migration issues of today.  She said, 
"People interest me.  If I have to define my 
photography, I'd say my studio is the street."

But as radical social movements in Mexico were 
either co-opted by the government or repressed, 
the ability of photographers to maintain links to 
them also weakened.  While in the U.S. some 
leftwing photographers, like Mieth and Hegel, 
were blacklisted and lost access to mainstream 
media, in Mexico an increasing conservatism 
slowly broke the link between photographers and 
radical unions and political parties. 

Despite this, Mexican photographers continued to 
use photography to document the bitter social 
reality underlying official optimism.  The work 
of Nacho Lopez, Hector Garcia and others rebelled 
against depicting either false cheer or the 
exploitation of indigenous pre-Hispanic cultures 
as exotic fare for Europeans and tourists.  Lopez 
famously remarked that "Photography was not meant 
as art to adorn walls, but rather to make obvious 
the ancestral cruelty of man against man, the 
greatness of his love for things and everyday 
things."13



Trabajadores, Hector Garcia, 1950s

Hector Garcia, who died last year at 89, also 
tried to use photography as a way to help 
dissident social movements break through the wall 
of official silence. He became active in the 
1930s, talking photographs of social protests in 
which he also participated, even starting a 
newspaper that carried his images of student 
marches.  One striking image from the exhibition 
shows two welders.  Their dark glasses, and cloth 
wrapped around their noses and mouths are the 
only protection from fumes and sparks. 

In 1958 he covered the Mexican railway strike, 
which led to the imprisonment of its leaders 
Demetrio Vallejo and Valentin Campa.  When 
muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros was imprisoned in 
1960 at the height of Mexico's anti-Communist 
purge, Garcia took a famous image showing him 
with his hand raised, behind the bars of the 
Lucumberri Prison.14  "What I've done practically 
all my life," he explained, "is to be a witness 
and to make graphic testimonies of the movements 
and struggles of the social classes in Mexico. 
This continues to be the most important motive I 
have to do photography."15

Iturbide herself, who later became known for 
images of indigenous culture, especially Nuestra 
Señora de las Iguanas, shown in the exhibition, 
had roots in photography connected to the 
political left.  In 1973 she went to Panama to 
take photographs of General Omar Torrijos, the 
radical who finally ended U.S. control over the 
Panama Canal.  "I'd been invited by people close 
the Communist Party to participate in a Peace 
Congress that was going to take place there...I'd 
just begun my work as a photographer, and at that 
time I was especially interested in showing 
aspects of indigenous culture."16  She began a 
series of trips to Panamanian rural communities, 
and a relationship with Torrijos that ended when 
he died in a mysterious plane explosion.  Her 
work documenting indigenous culture eventually 
won worldwide recognition.



La Nuestra Senora de las Iguanas, Juchitan, 
Oaxaca, Mexico, Graciela Iturbide, 1979

Eventually, however, the link between 
photographer and social movement became as 
difficult in Mexico as it was in the U.S.  But 
then students were shot in Tlatelolco Plaza in 
1968 (just shortly after the years documented in 
This Light of Ours).  The event shocked Mexican 
society in ways similar to seeing marchers 
attacked by dogs and fire hoses in the U.S. 
south.  Many of the country's progressive 
photographers had their outlook forged by that 
event and what followed.  Exhibitions of 
photographs, like that of the students stripped 
in front of soldiers after the massacre, still 
travel through Mexico.



Students arrested at Tlatelolco, Press photograph, 1968

The exhibition passes over many of the 
photographers and images of this generation, 
however, like Pedro Valtierra, who founded the 
important Mexican photography magazine 
Cuartoscuro.  Realism is represented by the huge 
aerial urban landscapes of Pablo Lopez Luz, the 
documentation of the excesses of the wealthy by 
Yvonne Vanegas and Daniela Rossell, or the 
wrestlers of Lourdes Grobet.17  But it is a more 
distant kind of realism, less connected to the 
movements for social change that have swept 
Mexico in the last few decades. 

In the last salon, the images of the phenomenon 
that has shaped Mexican consciousness today more 
than almost any other -- the migration of 11% of 
it people north of the border -- are mostly from 
U.S. rather than Mexican photographers.  That 
might have been an opportunity to present 
documentation arising from the concentration of 
Mexicans in the U.S., and the enormous debate 
over the status and rights of immigrants.  While 
the African American civil rights movement had 
specific issues arising from the history of Black 
people that are different from those affecting 
Mexican immigrants, the demand for social 
equality gives them a lot in common.  A new 
generation of indigenous Mexican photographers, 
including people like Leopoldo Peña and Miguel 
Bravo, now work on both sides of the border, as 
do U.S. photographers like David Maung, Fred 
Lonidier, Francisco Dominguez, myself and 
fortunately a number of others.

Instead of documenting the migrant rights 
movements in both Mexico and the U.S. (with its 
parallels to the civil rights movement a 
generation earlier) the signature piece for this 
section of the exhibition is a huge photograph of 
the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, a 
distant desert panorama in which the migrants 
themselves are strangely absent.18

Today debate over the mission of documentary 
photography and its content has often taken a 
back seat to discussion of its form and 
technique.  Yet many of the pioneering 
photographic techniques of the last century were 
made by socially-committed photographers looking 
for new ways to capture the imagination of their 
audience.  Many were migrants themselves -- 
refugees from Germany and Europe, like John 
Guttman, or Mieth and Hegel.  They sought to 
break the staid rules of artistic composition, 
sharpness, and angle to cause viewers to question 
their assumptions. Like playwright Bertoldt 
Brecht, they were disciples of realism, committed 
to class partisanship and showing social reality 
from the bottom up.  But they also often used a 
stylized technique that would not allow viewers 
to relax in comfort. Their use of the camera had 
a point to make, a critique.  As Garcia says, it 
was not meant to adorn walls.

The social crisis of our time calls for a similar 
redefinition of what photography can and should 
document.  Missing from mainstream U.S. 
photography is not so much the depiction of 
shocking social reality, but the sense that 
society can be changed, and a vision of what that 
change might be. Documentary photography is no 
longer didactic. It is detached, and the 
photographer looks at the contradictions, and 
sometimes the hypocrisy, from a distance.

This Light of Ours, and the historical context 
presented by Photography in Mexico show us an 
alternative -- engagement and social commitment, 
practiced by photographers in different periods 
on both sides of the border.  They not an 
exercise in nostalgia, but should provoke a 
discourse among documentary photographers about 
the content of work, and its relationship to the 
social movements of our time.  Today's movements 
are complex -- perhaps it's harder to find the 
sense of political certainty that animated the 
vision of Tina Modotti or Otto Hegel and Hansel 
Mieth.  But racism is still alive and well. 
Economic inequality is greater now than it has 
been for half a century.  People are fighting for 
their survival. 

And it's happening here, not just in 
safely-distant countries half a world away.


NOTES 1. Leslie Kelen, ed:  This Light of Ours 
(University Press of Mississippi, 2011) p. 228.  
2. Ibid, p. 120.  3. Ibid, p. 234.  4. Ibid, p. 
226.  5. Ibid, p. 15.  6. Ibid, p. 221-2.  7. 
Hansel Mieth and Otto Hegel, Night Meeting at the 
Cross Roads, 1936.  8. Hansel Mieth, Outstretched 
Hands, 1934.  9.  Agustin Casasola, Peasant 
Zapatistas, members of a Mexican insurgent group, 
are fed breakfast at the famous restaurant 
Sanborns, 1914.  10.  Manuel Alvarez Bravo, 
Obrero en Huelga Asesinado, 1934,   11. Mariana 
Yampolsky, Monopoly knows how to squeeze the last 
cent from the worker, lithograph, 1949.  12. 
Mariana Yampolsky, Martel,  1968.  13.  quoted by 
Blanca Ruiz, "Travesias / Muestran los fetiches 
de Nacho Lopez" [Voyages/Exhibit the fetiches of 
Nacho Lopez]. Reforma, Mexico City, 1999, p. 27.  
14. Hector Garcia, David Alfaro Siqueiros (El 
Coronelazo), Lecumberri, México, D.F., 1960.  15. 
quoted on the webpage of the Southwestern and 
Mexican Photography Collection, the Witleff 
Collections.  16. Graciela Iturbide, Torrijos: 
el hombre y el mito, Umbrage Editions, New York, 
2007, p. 78.  17. exhibition:  Photography in 
Mexico, SF Museum of Modern Art, 2012.  18. 
Victoria Sambunaris, Sin Titulo, from the series 
De La Frontera, 2010



Coming in 2013 from Beacon Press:
THE RIGHT TO STAY HOME:  Ending Forced Migration 
and the Criminalization of Immigrants



DISPLACED, UNEQUAL AND CRIMINALIZED - A Report 
for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation on the 
political economy of immigration
http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/displaced-unequal-and-criminalized/



David Bacon Discusses Worker Safety Amid Tragedy in Bangladesh Factory -
CCTV America
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0bwqU3ZED4&feature=youtu.be
Radio interview with Leticia Nava, fired Hilton 
worker, and Sara Garcia, Casa de Vecinos 
Organizados, about the impact of E-Verify firings 
and immigration reform
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/90718
With Solange Echevarria of KWMR about growers 
push for guest worker programs. Advance to 88 
minutes for the interview.
http://kwmr.org/blog/show/4156



See also Illegal People -- How Globalization 
Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants 
(Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002

See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575

See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the 
U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 
2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html

Entrevista con activistas de #yosoy132 en UNAM
Interview by activists of #yosoy132 at UNAM (in Spanish)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyF6AJQa9po&feature=relmfu

Two lectures on the political economy of migration
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GgDWf9eefE&feature=youtu.be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd4OLdaoxvg&feature=related

For more articles and images, see  http://dbacon.igc.org

-- 
__________________________________

David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org

__________________________________

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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