Poverty in plenty
Rick Nahmias follows his food to the fields and documents the journey on with Nikon.
RICK NAHMIAS was at cooking school in an affluent ZIP Code of the Napa Valley, a mouth-watering abundance of fruit and vegetables arrayed for his instruction every day, when it occurred to him to wonder at the hidden source of this bounty. "It astounded me," he says, "that nobody there talked about where all this food was coming from."
A screenwriter, photographer and then researcher for political columnist Arianna Huffington, Nahmias had gone to Napa with the thought of maybe getting into the restaurant business. But his curiosity sent him in another direction altogether: on a mission to document through photographs the lives of contemporary farmworkers in California.
The result of his six-month immersion in the fields, "The Migrant Project," is on exhibit at the Museum of Tolerance through April 25, one stop on a national tour. The exhibit's 40 black-and-white images offer a glimpse into the seldom-acknowledged reality of the labor force necessary to provide food for the nation's supermarkets and dinner tables. These photographs of farmworkers and their families are not overtly political, yet taken as a whole, they raise unavoidable questions about the wages and living conditions of the people who make the state's $32-billion-a-year agricultural industry possible.
The poverty and drudgery of the estimated 1.1 million California farmworkers (nine in 10 of whom are Latino) are not news, except that Nahmias' photographs provide fresh evidence that their long-lamented hardships and indignities remain much the same as they were when César Chávez began organizing in the Central Valley in the 1960s.
"I think it's a fallacy if anyone thinks that documentarians don't have an objective, a point of view," Nahmias says. "I'm not trying to disguise the fact that I come to the subject with sympathy for the people I'm photographing. But I want to believe I'm putting the information out there and allowing the audience to form their own opinions."
New mission
After that week in Napa Valley in 2002, Nahmias, now 42, returned with a new passion that compelled him to quit his job with Huffington and begin investigating where his tomatoes and strawberries came from and who picked them. Versed in the ways of Hollywood as a writer with projects in development, he briefly considered making a documentary film but rejected the idea in favor of doing something that would require only himself and a camera, his old Nikon FE, "the one thing in my hands that I knew I could count on," he says.
