UNION BUSTERS USE ICE TO INTIMIDATE WINE INDUSTRY WORKERS

UNION BUSTERS USE ICE TO INTIMIDATE WINE INDUSTRY WORKERS
By David Bacon , 
Truthout, August 20, 2026 
https://truthout.org/articles/union-busters-are-using-ice-to-intimidate-california-wine-industry-workers/

Sonoma County wine industry workers march through Healdsburg. 

In late July, Raul Calvo, a well-known California union-buster, called workers at the Rodney Strong Vineyards into a meeting. Salvador Ramirez, who'd labored among big wine tanks for 12 years, says he was shocked by what he heard. "He said he was just going to give us the information that he got in an email three days ago, that ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] was here outside," Ramirez remembers, noting that Calvo told workers the vineyard was technically in a border zone due to its proximity to the ocean. 

Ramirez says workers were very upset - not just by Calvo's implied threat, but because the company's attitude had changed drastically. Last October, when there were rumors that ICE agents planned a wave of raids in the San Francisco Bay Area like those underway in Los Angeles, the company had called everyone into a meeting. Ramirez recalled, "'You're our workers,' they told us. 'We have to support you and we're not going to allow them to come in [without a judge's warrant]. We're going to take care of each other.'"

Calvo did not respond to Truthout's request for comment.

In the months afterwards, however, workers began talking with each other. They then reached out to North Bay Jobs with Justice (JwJ), a coalition of community organizations and unions in Sonoma and Napa Counties with a long history of fighting for workers' rights. North Bay JwJ helped them organize a workplace committee, and put them in touch with Teamsters Local 665, a union with representatives on the organization's board. 

Ramirez and 31 of the winery's 50 workers signed a petition asking that the company agree to a card check process for recognizing the union they'd formed, and for a "fair process to exercise our right to organize and form a union without threats and intimidation." At the beginning of June, they took it to management. Rafael Malfavon, whom the workers call "Junior," presented it and asked the company to accept their decision. Community leaders - including Chris Herrod, the mayor of Healdsburg - went along to support them. 

The company's response was to hire a local union-buster, Jesse Rojas, who held two meetings with workers. Then Calvo, Rojas's boss, showed up. When he challenged Calvo in a meeting over misstatements about unions, Malfavon says he was ridiculed. "That just proved to us that the company won't listen to what workers are saying and what we're asking for, and hired this dude who calls me a liar," he said.

Workers formed a delegation and went to Becky Oseguera, the company's human relations director. According to Ramirez, "One of us said the company had brought in these people and they were trying to intimidate us with the migra, and that wasn't right. I said, 'We believe this is a very serious line that's been crossed.' She told us, 'Don't you see that I'm very busy, with all this stuff that you're doing?'" 

Participants in a North Bay Jobs with Justice march demand sueldos dignos, or fair wages.

Why Workers Organized

Ramirez and his co-workers started organizing in part because the company was terminating longtime workers. "They started having meetings with us," Malfavon recalled, "saying they had to cut their budget. No one would get bonuses like before. We noticed that we weren't getting raises while we had to do extra work, and they wouldn't hire people to help. But the executives were getting promotions." 

One fired worker was Belen Flores, who had banged her knee at work and was then let go by the company, citing a genetic vision problem as a pretext. "I could always do my job to the last day," Flores said. "I never got even a warning." 

Ramirez was incensed. "She'd been working here for nine years, and they fired her just like that," he said. "There were rumors that there are five more people on the list after Belen. I could see the future that awaits us."

Malfavon said that when his brother was terminated, he asked the company for some explanation. "They didn't want to answer any of my questions. I had no words. I literally sat in the corner and started crying. I felt so powerless." 

The terminations came on top of increasing economic pressure. Despite working at Rodney Strong while also holding another full-time job, Malfavon is still living at home with his parents. Two-thirds of the people working in the winery have second jobs, he says. Malfavon is desperately trying to save enough money to set up a new home with his wife in Sonoma County. "It's a huge step I'm making. I work over 80 hours a week, all the time, and I can't meet the rent. I just have three pairs of pants that I've had for six years."

Although winemaking has the image of a small-scale craft, in reality it's a major industry in which workers labor in factory-like environments with huge tanks and pipes in buildings that can seem endless. It is dangerous work where insufficient safety measures can put workers' lives at risk, and accidents can have catastrophic consequences. The deadliest hazard is work inside the tanks, cellars, and confined spaces, where a person can be quickly overcome by carbon dioxide and other gases.

In the last two decades, casualties included Gustavo Javier Muro at Ancien Wines and Salvador Plaza-Centeno at Dry Creek Vineyard. Leon Marcelo Lua was drawn into a machine, another industry hazard, after he'd been working for 10 hours at De Coninck Vineyards. Other wine industry laborers have died in falls or been crushed by machinery. 

Rodney Strong Vineyards does not have a record of industrial accidents causing major worker harm, but six years ago, 97,000 gallons of cabernet sauvignon wine poured from a tank when a door popped open, ending up in a creek feeding the Russian River. While no one was hurt, anyone in the path of the wine could have been overcome and swept through tanks and machinery.

Why Workers Want a Fair Process

For workers, the ability to work safely is guaranteed not just by company or government protocols, but by their own power on the job. To win that power, they want a "fair process," as they outlined in their petition. This process does not use the election machinery of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), but instead seeks a neutral party to verify that a majority of workers have signed cards or a petition. According to Local 665 President Mike Yates, this process was used recently by workers at a local Ready Mix concrete company. Other workers have used it at Sonoma County hotels.

Christopher O'Gorman, Rodney Strong's senior director of marketing communications, sent Truthout a statement saying the company respects workers' right to decide on unionization, but wants an election supervised by the NLRB: "A Card Check Neutrality Agreement limits our ability to share information with employees, reduces transparency, and, most importantly, replaces the protections of a secret-ballot election with a process that does not provide the same level of privacy for employees making this important decision."

Rodney Strong workers want a card check because they believe the process administered by the NLRB is manipulated by companies and union-busters like Calvo, while the Trump administration has biased the board even further against workers and unions. During the Biden administration, Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel for the NLRB, issued a memo holding that certain captive-audience meetings were illegal. Those meetings are mandatory for workers, who are required to listen to harangues about the dangers of unions and organizing.

Donald Trump fired Abruzzo and replaced her with Crystal Stowe Carey, a partner in the notorious anti-union law firm Morgan Lewis. Carey then announced she would overturn that ruling, making mandatory meetings with union-busters legal. The Senate recently confirmed a new Republican majority on the NLRB, committed to that and other reversals of pro-worker rules and procedures.

The meetings held by Rojas and Calvo might have been borderline legal, since they were not mandatory, and some workers even chose to attend in order to refute the propaganda barrage. But using immigration threats to scare workers and create an atmosphere of fear is certainly a violation of labor law. Unfortunately, enforcement of that law and workers' rights now lies in the hands of Carey and Trump's NLRB. Workers might reasonably lack confidence that they will ensure Rodney Strong Vineyards refrains from retaliating against union supporters.

Instead, the organizing strategy of Jobs with Justice and the Teamsters at Rodney Strong depends on a strong commitment by workers to build their union inside the winery, and on the Sonoma County community to act to support them. When the workers began this process, "I was scared and I still am a little," Malfavon said, "but I'm getting over that fear because they're just trying to intimidate us to make us stop."

Workers had confidence in this course of action, urged by JwJ and the Teamsters, because both have a track record in Sonoma County. "My wife and my children have come to marches and protests," Ramirez said. "They see that we don't fight alone, that there are people who have the same goals we want to achieve - a better quality of life for our families. So we'll keep going until we get what we want."

A wine industry worker demonstrates for justice

A Track Record of Coalition-Building to Defend Workers and Immigrants

For several years, North Bay Jobs with Justice has campaigned for higher wages to compensate workers for the risks and health impacts of work in heavy smoke during the forest fire season. In 2022, JwJ and supporters went to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, demanding stiffer protection requirements for growers who ask permission to send workers to harvest grapes in wildfire evacuation zones. The companies brought in Raul Calvo, who organized an astroturf group claiming to be farmworkers to show up at a supervisor meeting in T-shirts saying "NB [North Bay] JwJ does NOT Speak for Me." Calvo also conducted captive-audience meetings for wine industry workers to combat the campaign. 

Since 2020, Calvo has not filed the LM-20 and LM-21 forms the Department of Labor has required from anti-union consultants. There is no record of the money growers paid for his campaign against fire protections for workers, or how much Rodney Strong Vineyards is paying now. Rojas was listed as a consultant to Calvo on a 2020 form for work in another union-busting campaign, for which he was paid $283,633.

Workers exposed Rojas's 2020 payment in a leaflet to local activists. "Our community has responded in a very positive and supportive way," said Renee Saucedo, coordinator of the Sonoma County Sanctuary Coalition and director of the Raizes Collective, an organizing project among immigrant women workers. "Many of us have come to pickets co-sponsored by the Teamsters and Jobs with Justice, and we are ready to act."

Rodney Strong workers have offered support to the broader community in return. When Malfavon went to a meeting of the Sonoma County Tenants Union, "it was inspiring," he said. "I saw other people going through injustices, and then you see yourself in that. As much as they want to support us, I want to support them, to grow bigger and be more united in general."

So far, according to Yates, community activists have mobilized at least three times. In addition to accompanying workers when they handed management their petition, 200 people picketed a summer event, causing Rodney Strong to cancel it, and 250 attended a counter-demonstration to a company disco night fundraiser. Public officials also refused to cross the workers' picket line. "No one believes the company's claim that they're looking for an open and transparent process," Yates said, "when they threaten the workers in the same breath, using hired guns to scare them."

For many community organizations, the use of immigration scare tactics highlighted a larger danger of industry cooperation with immigration enforcement. Over the past year, Sonoma County has witnessed a growing wave of demonstrations opposing the county sheriff's policy of turning people incarcerated in jail over to ICE. So far in 2026, the sheriff has handed 21 people to ICE for deportation. 

When the Sonoma County Farm Bureau, representing the largest wine industry employers, defended the sheriff's actions, the Sanctuary Coalition held a die-in and press conference outside its offices. In a statement, Dayna Ghirardelli, executive director of the Sonoma County Farm Bureau, said the agency favored enforcement that targeted "criminals." 

"Our farms and ranches depend upon immigrant workers," she said. "But respect for immigrant families does not require abandoning common sense. In fact, if it were legally possible, I would support deporting some individuals convicted of the most serious and violent crimes who are U.S. citizens as well."

The North Bay Central Labor Council, to which Local 665 belongs, rejected that argument and urged the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors to pass a "Non-Collaboration With ICE" ordinance. "Sonoma County is not safer by providing information to ICE. Quite the opposite," the labor council wrote to supervisors in a letter. "The recent killings by ICE and US Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, by poorly trained agents, tell us that nobody is safe under these conditions." 

Saucedo responded to Ghiradelli: "How can employers of immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, say that they support workers when they are supporting policies that clearly hurt them?" While Rodney Strong Vineyards is not a Farm Bureau member, Saucedo says Calvo's statement to its workers was not an aberration. "Employers are increasingly using the threat of ICE when workers complain about working conditions and wages. In the world of domestic workers, employers make constant threats to call ICE."

By the same token, restraining the ability of wineries and growers to weaponize fear of ICE and deportation can create a more supportive environment for workers trying to organize. "When we see companies threaten people with immigration status, or with the loss of wages or the closure of their workplaces, we're going to take that on," said Alejandro Negrete, the organizing director of Teamsters Joint Council 7.

Saucedo believes the campaign is creating stronger partnerships between community-based organizations and unions. "It's pushing unions to do more to organize as equal partners in communities of immigrant workers," she said. "Immigrant rights and workers' rights are inseparable and must be defended together."

Renee Saucedo speaks at an immigrant rights rally.

From the Wineries to the Fields

Creating that supportive environment may also help in organizing field workers who pick the grapes for the wineries. Local farmworkers face not only the possibility of detention and deportation, but the loss of their jobs. In the last decade, Sonoma and Napa County winemakers have brought a growing wave of immigrants to work in their fields under the H-2A visa program. Last fall, the Trump administration cut the legally required wage for these temporary contract laborers by $3/hour in California, and now is allowing growers to charge them another $3/hour for the often substandard housing they formerly had to supply for free. Workers who protest abusive conditions, including these changes, can be fired at will, and are then blacklisted by recruiters.

According to Marcos Lopez, research director for the Labor and Community Center at the University of California, Davis, in 2008 the Department of Labor certified Sonoma County growers to fill only 92 jobs with H-2A workers. Last year, that had grown to 1,639 jobs, about a quarter of the wine industry jobs in the county. Those workers stayed not just for the 10-12 week harvest, but for an average of 39 weeks.

"The H-2A program has led to the casualization of labor for local workers," Lopez said. "Local residents, who once held year-round positions, are increasingly hired only during peak seasons, like the harvest, essentially as a temporary workforce." 

JwJ organizer Max Bell Alper says local farmworkers fear that they can be displaced at any time. "People were experiencing a shitty job already," he said, "and it was getting worse. But they're desperate for the work they have, and as H-2A recruitment mushrooms, they have not been ready to organize."

One way to break that fear, Alper says, is by setting a new standard for wages and job security among workers in the wineries, who often belong to the same families as those working in the picking crews. "Let's establish that standard, and then let's fight for the field workers to have that too," Alper urged. "We need some fights, which farmworkers can be a part of as well."

"For decades, the Sonoma County wine industry has generated immense wealth on the backs of workers," added JwJ organizer Gabriel Cardenas. "But the current economic conditions are unsustainable for workers, and that's leading to a growing realization that collective action is essential for survival."

Malfavon believes organizing Rodney Strong Vineyards will therefore help everyone. "This is for the field workers going out there at two or three in the morning, for the truck drivers that put in countless hours with no sleep, and for every other worker in the winery, from the people that sell it to the people that consume it," he said. "I want them to see how many people it takes for them to actually enjoy a nice bottle of wine. I want them to see what we're fighting for - to make our voices heard."

photos from the edge 39 - PARIS OF THE STREETS

photos from the edge 39 - PARIS OF THE STREETS
Photographs by David Bacon

Paris at one time was the most photographed city in the world.  The boy with the bread loaves.  The man jumping the puddle.  The kiss in front of city hall.  And then, after the war, confronting the collaborators.  

People love Paris because its Popular Front stood against fascism, and then resisted the Nazis.  The love for the photographs is bound up in the way we think of its heroic history, and the way Parisians remember it.  Walking up the hill towards the Belleville Park, the street ended and I came on a small frieze that remembers the site where the communards fought the last battle - where the Paris Commune ended in their deaths.  Nearby, a bunch of dried flowers on a wall remembers a young man who died in the Resistance, fighting Nazis.  

Then I passed two computer-printed sheets in a window.  They spoke in today's spare language:  "I LOVE FUCK NEW YORK" and "BOMB TEXAS."  And ensconced in the artists' graffiti in a Belleville alley, Rue Denoyez, is the call by Paris Anti-Fasciste to demonstrate - "Pas de Nazis dans Paris!" - "No Nazis in Paris!" 

Paris in the years before and after WW2 was more than the Popular Front, a home of the European French.  It was the metropole of a global empire, and therefore a headquarters where the empire's unwilling subjects planned anti-colonial strategies.  Their movements to break those colonial bonds often started here.  The future leaders of revolutions in Vietnam, China, Ghana, Senegal and many countries walked the city's streets.  They attended its universities and met in its bookstores and secret apartments.  

Yet the photographic archive of that time celebrates little of this history.  Its great photographers still showed Paris as a very European and an overwhelmingly white city.  

Throwing off colonialism ended that vision.  The colonies became independent, yet the bonds remained.  Formerly colonized people arrived in the metropolis, and are still coming.  France's political left recognizes that movement and documents it at the new Museum of the History of Immigration.  Until the 1960s its building, the Palais de la Porte Dorée, first housed the Museum of the Colonies.  Then, using the later colonial euphemism, it called itself the Museum of Overseas France. The giant bas reliefs beside its grand entrance, and the murals in its vaulted portico, all celebrate idealized stereotypes of happy colonial people, working in the industries that made France rich.  

Inside, the museum turns that history on its head.  Its photographic archive includes images made of and by people in the waves of migration that have made Paris what it is today.  On its walls, for instance, hang the photographs of photojournalist Amadou Gaye of the newspaper Sans frontier (Without borders), who documented the March for Equality and Against Racism of 1983.

On the streets outside the museum the visual language of Paris' alleys and boulevards is different from the pre- and post-WW2 years.  In many ways Paris was always an international and internationalist city, even if not in the eyes of most photographers then. But the immense diversity of its people make it impossible today to see it as anything else.  

These are just a few pictures, glimpses of its streets during this summer's heat dome.  This is the Paris where Turks, Moroccans and Malians hawk fruit and vegetables in the Belleville produce market that extends for blocks.  It's the Paris of Carlos, singing the Colombian vallenato, La Tierra del Olvido, in the cavernous metro.  It is the Paris of the evicted African drum player keeping time to the speech of the organizer from Droit au Logement (Right to Housing) outside City Hall.  It's the Paris of those who sleep next to walls filled with graffiti, and at the same time, of the painter finding the right green for the water lilies in the Botanical Garden. Paris today belongs as much to the vast crowds who watch a museum guard help a man in a wheelchair take iPhone photos in front of the Mona Lisa. And of course it still belongs to the lovers who lean into each other on a bicycle or sleep against each other on a park bench, escaping the fierce heat of climate change.  

Go see for yourself.  

For images of the graffiti on Belleville's Rue Denoyez, click here.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72177720335190858

For images of the murals and bas reliefs from the Museum of the Colonies, click here.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72177720335177291

 

photos from the edge 38 - WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO WORK ON A CAULIFLOWER CREW?

photos from the edge 38 - WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO WORK ON A CAULIFLOWER CREW?
Words and photos by David Bacon
The Bittman Project, 8/7/26
https://bittmanproject.substack.com/p/what-does-it-take-to-work-on-a-cauliflower?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=8mf9r&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email



In the winter of 1977, at the Watsonville union hall, I got a dispatch to a job in a Valley Harvest cauliflower crew. Two years earlier the state legislature had passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act. The company was one of the first where workers used the new law, winning a union election, a contract, and with it the hiring hall system for distributing work.

That year I left my job as a UFW organizer and went to work in the fields. I needed the money, and wanted to understand firsthand agriculture's often brutal labor. I worked through that fall, getting a dispatch first for a painful job picking strawberries, and then another to harvest wine grapes on the piece rate at the huge Almaden Vineyards. Working on the piece rate you're paid according to what you produce, in this case, the quantity of grapes we picked. 

When the grapes were gone, I needed another job.  Cutting cauliflower for Valley Harvest was one of the few available in December.  It paid by the hour, not much more than minimum wage. That meant that I wouldn't make as much money as I did at Almaden, but working for an hourly wage avoided the intense pressure of the piece rate. I was never a very fast worker anyway.

So every morning I'd leave my SRO hotel room in Hollister, pick up my lunch burritos and a cup of coffee from the bar downstairs, and drive the 23 miles to the packing house parking lot in Pajaro. With the other 40-plus workers in my crew, I'd get on the company bus for the ride to the field.  We'd sleepily stumble out into the cold fog, put on our aprons, and use one of the company stones to sharpen up our machetes for the day's work.

As the mist burned off the coastal fields, we'd walk behind a conveyor belt and packing platform, pulled by a tractor. The giant leaves of the plants were covered with dew, and bound together with long rubber bands. This practice, called blanching, protected the cauliflower heads from the sun, making sure they stayed the white color favored by consumers at Safeway.  The job was to grab the leaves, cut the stalk with a machete, and toss it onto the belt. Other workers there would trim the leaves, wrap the heads in plastic, and pack them into boxes.

One morning we looked for the stones, and they weren't there. The foreman announced that in a fit of economizing, Valley Harvest had decided not to furnish them. If we wanted sharp machetes, we'd have to fend for ourselves. The stones couldn't have cost the company much, but they were crucial. Trying to cut a tough, thick cauliflower stalk with a dull blade makes the work twice as hard. We were pretty angry.

We worked through that day, and at lunch some of us talked it over. I said, "Well, we need to do something, so maybe we should tell the company we're not going to work unless they give us the whetstones back." Someone else said, "Yeah, but what about those folks over there, the Oaxacans?" They were a close-knit group that would eat a little ways away from the rest of us, talking softly with each other in an unfamiliar language. Later I learned they were speaking Mixteco, an indigenous language of southern Mexico.

I went over to talk to them, and explained in Spanish what we wanted to do. I asked, "What about you folks? Are you going to be with us or not?" One of them answered, "Well, let us talk about it and we'll get back to you." Then they went off by themselves and had a little meeting in the road by the field. When they came back he said, "Yeah, we're with you. Let's do it."

The following morning we got out of the bus and refused to go into the rows. The foreman suddenly discovered the box of stones, still under a seat. So we got them back, sharpened our knives, and went to work. That day I learned a little about the indigenous people arriving from Oaxaca, especially that they were already very well organized. They knew how to act collectively,  thanks to the indigenous culture of the towns they came from.

Today several hundred thousand Indigenous farmworkers from southern Mexico labor in fields, not just in California, but all over the U.S. Their culture, and their political and labor activism, are changing rural communities profoundly. They've educated me for fifty years, an education that started in that field.

Not long ago I came upon another cauliflower crew working on a Salinas Valley farm. It took a while, and several phone calls, to get permission from the foreman, but finally I was able to start taking pictures. I joked with the workers, asking their permission also, as I tried for photographs that would show the intimate details of their work.  

I saw that in 50 years it hadn't changed that much. Workers still cut behind the slow-moving tractor and packing platform. These workers used shorter knives, rather than our long awkward machetes, and trimmed the leaves from the cauliflowers before putting them on the conveyor belt. But bending into those big wet leaves, cutting and tossing the heads onto the belt, was the same. I remembered too how my back would feel on fire after hours of this labor, and I'm sure that was the same as well.

The biggest change is that growers have bred a variety of cauliflower that produces leaves that bend inward to shade the head. Now they get that white color, and don't have to pay workers to put the blanching bands around the plant. That job, which used to help families survive the slow season, no longer exists. 

The idea that a sun-tanned cauliflower head is unattractive to consumers actually leads to waste on many farms. Heads exposed to the sun taste the same, and may actually contain more phytonutrients - chemicals that help plants defend themselves against insects and disease, and that benefit humans as well. But Richard Melvin, a Nova Scotia cauliflower grower, estimates that up to 40 percent of his crop is plowed back into the ground because of its "off" color.  

Nevertheless, the crew in the Soledad field, cutting for the Nature's Reward brand of the Huntington family, didn't seem to leave many heads behind. A lot of growers also grow orange, purple and green varieties. The chemicals that create the colors include beta-carotene, chlorophyll and anthocyanins, which are antioxidants and healthy for humans.  But even white cauliflower provides Vitamin C and folate, sun-tanned or not.  

I used to steam my cauliflower whole and smother it in cheese sauce until my wife became lactose-intolerant. Now we usually cut the head into florets, and roast them with a sprinkling of breadcrumbs and parmesan cheese, dusting them with a little chile spice mix. When I eat them I think of the fields where I worked near Watsonville, and appreciate the labor of the men and women who cut the cauliflower today.

photos from the edge 37 - ISTANBUL PHOTOGRAPHS

photos from the edge 37 - ISTANBUL PHOTOGRAPHS
Photographs by David Bacon

These photographs taken this summer are my small tribute to the work of the great Turkish photographer, Ara Guler.  His dark, moody images of his beloved Istanbul, taken starting in the 1950s when he was in his twenties, have become the city's visual memory of itself.  In them, people recall and ponder the way it looked and felt before so much was swept away by the modernization of the last few decades, with its tourism and gentrification.

Lillian and I were waiting on the dock in Eminonu for a ferry to take us up the Golden Horn to the huge cemetery of Eyupsultan, when I found a small bookstore and café above the slips where the boats come in.  In what other city in the world, I thought, would you find a place in a ferry terminal to read and buy a book to go with your coffee while you wait.  And in the bookstore there was a little section devoted to Guler.  

That says something about how ordinary people - from the commuters who take the boat to work every day to the students riding the ferry to school - think about him. To Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize for his novels in 2006, Guler with his camera was the poet of "the Istanbul of the 1950s and 1960s - the streets, pavements, shops and dirty, neglected factories, its ships, horse carts, buses, clouds, private taxis, shared taxis, buildings, bridges, chimneys, mists and people; and the soul in all these things, so difficult to recognize at first sight." 

I already had a little book of his photographs at home, but waiting for the ferry I splurged and bought a big one.  I sat drinking my coffee and looked to see if I would recognize anything.  When I was sixteen and just out of high school, I took several hundred dollars I was paid when a car hit me years earlier, and used it to hitchhike through Europe.  Starting in Paris I headed east, finally winding up in Istanbul.  

It was 1965, and there were pictures in the book that Guler had taken that year.  I looked at the photographs and marveled at their gritty, earth-connected working-class vision of his city.  I thought, I didn't know how lucky I was to have seen just a little piece of Istanbul as it was then.  

Much as I wanted to rediscover Guler's Istanbul, I knew everything changes.  Guler himself changed, becoming a celebrity Magnum photographer, better known outside Turkey for taking photographs of famous people. But I decided the best way to acknowledge and honor him was to do as he did - look for people in the street, or working in the small shops.  

So many of his images were taken on the Galata Bridge across the Golden Horn, and in the communities surrounding each end of it.  How could I pay tribute to him without just a few photographs on the bridge?  And along with the tourists, there were still the old guys fishing, as he'd seen them half a century ago.

Taking a photograph freezes a moment, letting you see just a tiny piece of someone's life. That fragment can then acquire a life of its own, becoming part of a collective memory of a city or of a people.  That's what happened to Guler's photographs - why they're so honored. But at the time you release the shutter and freeze the image, you're just trying to honor that person you see.  That's not so different whether you're a famous guy like Ara Guler, or just another guy with a camera, like me.