Photojournalist David Bacon in front of the Reclusorio Norte prison in Mexico City. Photo by a bus driver on strike. The bus union’s leaders were in the Reclusorio, and Bacon went inside to interview them.
If you have seen photography that brings to life the faces of farm laborers working the fields or on strike from Baja California to Yakima, Washington, it may well have been the work of David Bacon.
For 30 years, Bacon has documented the struggles of farmworkers and migrant communities through photographs, articles and oral histories, with a particular focus on California and the U.S.-Mexico border.
His path toward journalism passed through activism. As a young child in Oakland, he was questioned by the FBI about his blacklisted radical-leftist father. He was later drawn to Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement and got arrested for the first time when he was just 16, for taking part in a sit-in at Sproul Hall, which was then the main administrative building at the University of California at Berkeley.
During the 1970s, Bacon became a United Farm Workers organizer for about five years, a decision that profoundly affected the trajectory of his life. Later, he spent 20 years organizing factory and garment workers before becoming a photojournalist and writer to cover the world that he knew best – that of working people.
A PHOTOJOURNALIST’S LENS ON «MORE THAN A WALL»
By Gabriel Thompson
Capital & Main, 6/1/22
https://capitalandmain.com/a-
photojournalists-lens-on-more-than-a-wall
https://
davidbaconrealitycheck.
blogspot.com/2022/06/a-
photojournalists-lens-on-more-than.html
David Bacon spent three decades capturing the experiences of laborers, their treatment and where they came from.