color -- then and now The Evening of 'Long Knives'

These agricultural workers take on the appearance of

advancing 'forces' in early evening as they leave their jobs with a

form of 'machete' knives in hand, in lettuce fields, Watsonville,

California. Your ratings and critiques are invited and most

welcome. If you rate harshly or very critically, please submit a

helpful and constructive comment/Please share your superior

photographic knowledge to help improve my photography. Thanks!

Enjoy! John

Man I bet that's backbreaking work - I don't envy them, but at least they're willing to work unlike so many here in the UK.

When documentary photography becomes a subject of an everyday neverwidelyseen topic then the only thing that makes it unique is the eye of the photographer.

 

Happilly John Crosley has also not just the eye of the photographer but the experience to mix everyday with never before. So you may see some men like these someday in your life but surely not from the angle that John Crosley sees it.

 

Aesthetically someone will not understand why this is not a sunset or a bumble bee

full of exotic colours, or yet the use of an infrared filter of Photoshop to make it shiny. It's because photography in its context has something unique that John makes it more valuable. Originality, where in the use of technicalities it's lost gradually.

 

So cutting edge photography is made through originality of simple men holding knives, not mouses in Photoshop. It's a good start to undestand where sometimes, photography has to show us something real, and remind us the past, when we will be in the future. Because when John photographs he is really looking already in the future.

 

Men holding knives, John holding a camera.

 

Cutting edge photography!

There's a continuing dispute in American over whether these Mexicans are 'stealing' American jobs, since ten to one they're undocumented, hence illegal, or whether Americans would do the work at all.

 

When I was a youth as a student, I worked side by side with students and braceros -- migrant field workers from Mexico who traveled North from Mexico to the Northwest following the crop harvest and they could outpick the best of us two to one, though I did give them a run for their money.

 

But sometimes in their migrant camps, there as a flash of switchblade knives, etc., as they truly were transients.

 

It's probably better to have a resident population, as here, these workers live and work in nearby Watsonville (distance) and commute to work by converted 'school' buses to which they are racing after having worked at a giant picking machine on which they lopped heads of lettuce and which carried the heads away via a giant conveyor belt onto a waiting truck . . . eventually a series of trucks.

 

The 'belt' was literally a moving factory in the fields 20 or so rows of lettuce wide, perhaps wider, always traveling at a specific speed down the rows, with one or two workers (male and femals) per row, lopping off those lettuce heads (salad for those in Eastern Europe) (and it's iceberg lettuce, the most easily transportable . . . and the least nutritious, but it is easy to transport, which is essential . . . as American food often travels over 1,500 miles to market and musn't spoil during the trip, during supermarket display, or while stored in a refrigerator at the other end.

 

I took a lot of photos of these men racing toward their bus at quitting time; but this one showed them in an arc, like an advancing army, perhaps falsely portraying them as a little more ferocious than their gentle nature (and fatigued), but it makes a good photograph, I think.

 

And, for photographic purposes, they make a giant 'C' curve, one element of a good photograph, as it pulls the viewer's eye into the photograph.

 

Thanks Ben, for commenting.

 

John (Crosley)

One labor intensive job I had as a kid was putting threads onto the end of 6 inch reduction pipes for an engineering factory, the machine took 17 seconds to thread each pipe and I did this from 7am to 5pm for 3 months - I learnt the value of money (and subsequently forgot it). I had a number of other similar jobs during summer breaks, and even worked for a firm of movers in Milwaukee the year I finished university - interesting work where you learn a lot about how people live.

I couldn't resist asking whether the words 'cutting edge' were chosen to complement my choice of a photo featuring knives/machetes.

 

I am not sure whether this is 'cutting edge' or a throwback to the old magazine photographers who adorned the pages of Life, Look, Colliers, or even National Geographic and maybe Paris Match, but wherever it belongs, I kind of like this photograph.

 

I took a lot of photographs, primarily for future possible stock photography sales, of the men and women working on the giant conveyor belt, but the arrangement of these men (and knife wielding at that) conveyed a scene that was a little surreal, and that is another category altogether in photography.

 

Cartier-Bresson wanted to be called a surreal photographer, and was only talked out of it by Robert Capa who talked him into calling himself a photojournalist, but he always kept the element of 'art' and the 'surreal' which he idealized, in his photography.

 

I try, in some of my photographs, to include both of those elements -- to cause some viewers to wonder -- 'how did he get those guys arranged like that and what are they doing if they're truly cutting lettuce (they are racing to their bus home after quitting buzzer, but adopted for a moment a particular pattern, which I caught and enshrined forever).

 

And, of course, the lead guy had a machete (as did others, background).

 

This also works well as a B&W, and I debated whether to postit as a B&W only, and may yet post it that way also. Sometimes desaturated color photos do better that way, to show their graphic qualities.

 

Thank you for the high accolade -- I'm quadruply flattered. I hope to God I deserve it. Time will tell. (It's a midnight post, so probably the rates won't).

 

John (Crosley)

If you look at prior posts in this folder, you'll find a number of interesting posts -- two men touching fingers outside a bar, three people in Ukraine looking at me -- the photographer -- in different levels of approval entirely, male tango dancers in Argentina caught at a special moment, with a kick of a dancer's heel, also seeming to have kicked a 'bubble' of a wall plaque, and so on.

 

I try, in my photographs, in this particular folder and in my Early B&W folder (includes recent work), to add some of the 'quirky' elements. For instance, see the two women, upturned noses--laughing overlookong menfolk working hauling heavy paving stones below (the women are wall graphics, but the photo tells a story, and for that city a true one at that).

 

Story-telling, use of color as an essential element and particular use of composition and graphics are important to the photos in this folder, which is why I chose this particular photo -- a semi-circle of men ('C' curve of men) rushing across a field of lettuce, more like a detachment of soldiers than of lettuce pickers.

 

Thank you Billy Syk for your fine encomium; but not everyone will 'understand' these photos. But for those who do, I hope they enjoy them very much, a lot of work not only went into taking them, but also into choosing them for the proper folder.

 

John (Crosley)

A sickle of men perhaps then John? Are you sublty trying to usher us to the understanding that these men are cutting their way through the field - and I don't mean with the knives?

I man I once knew hired a high school dropout to 'cut' pipes using an unguarded 4-inch saw blade attached to a milling machine, placed him atop a broken pallet, and then had him 'cut' pipes.

 

The kid's jacket (the shop was unheated and the jacket was a little threadbare) got caught in the saw blade and the saw cut the boy's forearm mostly off and the remainder was taken off in surgery. The boy has lived the rest of his life without a forearm.

 

Threading pipes at 17 seconds (I'm sure you counted those seconds many times) must have seemed like boring work, but that young Mexican-American boy never saw it to his first rest break.

 

He collected well over $1 million (exact amount was supposedly secret except a defense attorney quoted the amount to a judge and the judge ordered the transcript destroyed because if the boy knew the amount of the settlement for a structured settlement the entire settlement was subject to income tax -- here the judge actually committed a felony, but in the name of true justice).

 

I kept shut as I didn't know the ramifications (and I was merely an observer, without status, as no one was suing my guy (the employer whose unguarded saw blade had done the forearm cutting -- but under Workers' Compensation laws, he was immune from being sued, so the case turned against the manufacturer of the 'mill' which propelled the saw and the maker of the 'saw' attachment (when sold in Europe it had a safety attachment -- a guard) because it was unguarded as used in the U.S. and was an 'accident waiting to happen'.

 

We all had our 'scut' jobs at first -- one of mine was working in a beet field that had been rained on, driving a truck to receive beets into a giant hopper, but the rainy mud caused the beets to jam as though they were cast in concrete and we had to use giant pieces of lumber to try to pry them apart while perched high above the ground precariously on the edge of the high hopper -- using amazing force, often for an hour at a time -- rough, sweaty work.

 

I've had a huge share of awful jobs, and therefore my charaacter must be 'sterling'.

 

(But later I was assistant to a Vice President of Columbia University while a student and got to travel across the country instead of attending classes, often with luminaries such as cultural and literary luminaries such as Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling (google them) and Arthur Burns, past and future chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisors. Hell of a heady time for a 20-21 year old. And in summers I bagged grociers of worked in a lumber mill. A huge disconect. One coast I hung out with the nation's mot prominent people, and in summers worked with guys like Percy the illiterate, loading lumber into boxcars, board by board by board by board all day and all might, day after long day and other arduous tasks. Then I also was an assistant to a Peabody Award winner in broadcasting for New York's premier cultural radio station (he didn't really know who I was, but I WAS his assistant, and learned from him -- a Peabody is like the Academy Award of braodcasting.)

 

;-))

 

John (Crosley)

I'm baffled by your last post -- these guys 'look' like they're an army phalanx, but they're really just going home.

 

A 'sickle of men'? Interesting choice of words, but maybe Communist inspired. They need their hammers.

 

John (Crosley)

The place where I threaded pipes wasnt exactly the greatest on safety, one guy trod on a swarf pile (metal turnings from lathes) in trainers (sneakers) and severed his achilles tendon, another got shot in the head by the top bolt from a milling machine after he'd used a hammer to 'adjust' it - start - bang - it didn't penetrate his skull :)

 

Another time a chap left the guard open on his CNC only to have a counterweight (a good 20 kilos) thrown out of the machine - right across a 40 yds room and take an exterior door of it's hinges - it missed him by a whisker, needless to say he was a bright shade of white for a while.

 

One of my colleagues drove a fork lift with the forks raised directly into a roof beam, thankfully it just made a bit of a bang.

 

This was only abut 20 years ago (19 to be precise).

 

I actually really enjoyed working there.

Speaking of dangerous jobs. When I was loading boxcars for the lumber mill, Weyerhaeuser, the dimwit I worked with, picking up piece of lumber after piece of lumber all summer long, a trologodyte named Percey, who kept guns and lived from illegally poached deer meat (I think) regaled me daily with the tale of a former lumber pickup partner (which I was).

 

He said that the partner and he were motioning a forklift or overhead crane to move a load of lumber closer and closer to a boxcar and the man stuck his head between the boxcar and the load of lumber, a forklift full and the conveyance failed to sense the danger and stop.

 

The man's head 'popped like a watermelon' Percey told me, all summer long, day after day, regaling me daily with details of the gory accident and the man's on the job death.

 

Needless to say, I didn't trust Percey to do anything regarding safety, and I learned to watch my own back -- which probably accounts for my learning in part how to conduct myself safely on streets of foreign countriees today.

 

Overhead cranes had a 'cage' of movable tines which they could slip under a load of lumber, turn the tines, pick up the load of lumber then shoot down a 'shipping shed' three blocks long and deliver somewhere else.

 

But whether the cage were empty or full and too low, lumber awaiting shipping piled three stories high had interleaving pieces of 12 x 12 inch 'bumks' atop each load to separate it from other piles, and a careless crane operator with his crane apparatus too low could send one of those 'bunks' flying into a 'work row' from three stories up, to crush a man, or he could just knock over a three-story stack of lumber (or several) and it would fall where we were working (both happened numerous times, but we escaped injury because we watched and ran when the nearsighed crane operator was on duty -- we knew which ones were error prone.)

 

Percey was a real piece of work. I doubt he had an IQ above 85. Once I had been taped for a TV game show (embarrassingly, I lost) in the Spring in New York City after my school, Columbia was shut down by rioters. ('I Guess', with Bill Cullen.) They aired it in the afternoon and I worked night shift.

 

Percey watched it (and me) one afternoon. He had no inkling he had watched his 'work partner' -- me, on national television, that afternoon, when he showed up for a night's work at 4:30 p.m.

 

When told, he said "that that guy on TV 'looked 'kind of familiar' . . . "

 

God looks after fools and little children.

 

The foreman knew the best crane operator, who made the shipping shed have super productivity, was building his own house, so that crane operator often went out of the main gates security guard office with huge pieces of lumber tied under his pickup truck, sticking out front and back, and nobody ever stopped him -- obviously stealing from the company, but being rewarded for making the company extra money because of his super skills.

 

It was 'frontier justice' for his super skills and my first introduction to 'on-the-job' graft, but in a sort of 'good' way, well not 'good' exactly since stealing is never good, but the man's good work made us all plenty of money and made the overworked mill bottleneck work out, since he was the source of working out the bottleneck. and the mill was too stupid to give him a 'bonus' -- his white-hard hat supervisor simply 'gave him a bonus' by letting him openly steal some lumber for the house he was building, and he worked his proverbial butt off, and made the company tons of money and eliminated a bottleneck that was not his fault.

 

It was a tradeoff, 'under the table' so to speak.

 

We were swamped by orders, and the shipping shed couldn't ship fast enough, while the cranes of the shipping shed were so overworked they couldn't get the stacks of lumber delivered to the lumber pickers fast enough (exept for this guy, who worked like 'deus ex machina' with his overhead crane on rails -- always there on time and almost never making a mistake, an almost perfect worker.

 

His 'graft' was actually a 'bonus' for getting the entire company millions in extra profits by encouraging him to work harder. He was a hard worker who was encouraged by that graft to work extra hard.

 

In the meantime, I was always scared of working with Percey who might give any fork lift operator or crane operator instructions, for fear his next instruction would result in my head's 'popping like a watermelon' like that previous work partner'.

 

John (Crosley)

I have managers whom I swear could be named Percy.

Watch your head. Percy told me that popped heads tend to 'splat', all over the place . . . . He told me that every day . . . a whole summer long.

 

John (Crosley)

I have a colleague who operates in a vaguely similar manner - he insists on telling completely and hopelessly boring, unfunny, anecdotes - repeatedly until one feels forced to laugh to put him out of his misery. The poor man simply has zero empathic skills.

Ben,

 

If that's the case, it's remarkable you're not a great deal more dyspepsic and a critic with a bag full of 3/3s. . . . .

 

;~))

 

John Crosley

Well, fortunately, he's an exception to the norm. I find most people to be highly engaging.

 

I only remove 3/3's from the bag when they're appropriate - have a peek at my rating record. I much prefer to offer commentary.