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.