Thursday, 1 August 2019

the social movement photography of david bacon - homeless and hungry in people's park

the social movement photography of david bacon - homeless and hungry in people's park


David Bacon Fotografias y Historias
THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT PHOTOGRAPHY OF DAVID BACON - HOMELESS AND HUNGRY IN PEOPLE'S PARK
By David Bacon
The Progressive, July 30, 2019
https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-social-movement-photography-of_30.html
https://progressive.org/dispatches/the-social-movement-photography-of-david-bacon-peoples-park-190730/



Editor's note: We're delighted to share the sixth of a multi-part series from the archives of photographer David Bacon. A former union organizer, Bacon's photographs and writing from over the past thirty years capture the courage of people struggling for social and economic justice in countries around the world. His images are now part of Special Collections in Stanford University's Green Library.

Part Six tells the story of what happened at People's Park in Berkeley, California, in the years after a police attack in which park activists were beaten and killed. In the ensuing decades, the space was occupied by people displaced by gentrification, and Bacon found community activists organizing to bring them food while they tried to find a place to live off the streets.


For student radicals of 1969, People's Park was a transformative moment. In 1967 the University of California acquired a 2.3-acre plot of land near Telegraph Avenue for dormitories or a soccer field.  After buying the land, the university bulldozed about twenty-five single family homes and boarding houses, which many people felt was a move to get rid of low-income housing.

The area sat vacant for two years, until April 1969, when it was taken over by the surrounding community, transforming in just a few days into a green expanse of trees, grass, a performance stage and other products of the 1960s imagination. Berkeley residents had grown tired of the University of California's octopus-like acquisition of land. People's Park was an act of creative resistance.

People's Park was an act of creative resistance.

Within a month, the university mobilized the Berkeley Police to retake the park. On May 15, after the university's chancellor ordered the property cleared, Berkeley police, backed by the California Highway Patrol, deployed guns and teargas against demonstrators up and down Telegraph Avenue. In the escalating conflict, cops shot and killed James Rector as he stood on the roof of a building watching it all unfold below. On May 30, 35,000 people marched from the campus to the park to protest, but a fence remained around People's Park until May 1972, when protesters took it down for good.

This story was recently retold in The Battle for People's Park, Berkeley 1969 -  a brilliant book of text and photographs by Tom Dalzell, who we affectionately called The Dazzler years later when he worked for the United Farm Workers.

By the 1990s, as gentrification hit Berkeley and upscale housing pushed low income people onto the streets, many of the displaced found their way to the park. Berkeley has always had a floating population of young people passing through, and they too found in People's Park a place where they could unroll sleeping bags and rest from the road.  The park's permanent residents, some of whom wound up living there for decades, developed an uneasy alliance with those they sometimes scornfully called "the travelers."

At the end of that decade, I began a long partnership with the Alameda County Food Bank, documenting widespread hunger and homelessness throughout the East Bay, in reports the Food Bank issued every two or three years. For the next 15 years I went with hunger activists out to food distributions. Together we interviewed people living in garages and tent encampments-living testimony to the endemic poverty mushrooming in this land of plenty.

[. . .]


THE FACES BEHIND THE OIL AMERICA WENT TO WAR FOR
Photo report by David Bacon
Equal Times, July 5, 2019


Despite the geopolitical importance of Iraq's oil, and the central role that oil played in its invasion by a US-led coalition in March 2003, 16 years ago people in the US and Europe knew very little about the workers who made the world's second biggest oil industry function. In October 2003, the US photographer David Bacon went to Baghdad to learn how the occupation was affecting Iraq's workers and unions. At the Daura Oil Refinery and at other factories in Baghdad, he documented the lives of workers.  In 2005 he returned to Iraq, this time to Basra, where he photographed and interviewed oil workers and the leaders of their union.

See the report in Equal Times at

Equal Times is a trilingual (English, French and Spanish) global news and opinion website focusing on labour, human rights, culture, development, the environment, politics and the economy from a social justice perspective.  Located in the heart of Europe, we are supported by the 200 million-member International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)
 

PODCAST:  Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen:  Erasing Unsettling Truth: The San Francisco Mural Controversy

Art, by its nature, is often about challenging the viewer. You may have heard of the controversy about large Depression-era murals on the walls of San Francisco's George Washington High School. After 80 years, why did the school board vote to spend $600,000 to now cover it up? Painted as part of the New Deal's WPA by Victor Arnautoff, these frescoes show the real George Washington - slave owner - and the white settlers whose progress meant destruction of native people. It is disturbing. SF photographer and author David Bacon says racism is the cause of students' trauma, and argues that participatory solutions are an alternative to covering it up. Click http://bit.ly/2O5COCO to listen to the podcast.
 

Exhibition Schedule
Exhibitions of photographs are scheduled for the following venues and dates:

In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte
Scheduled exhibitions:

June 16, 2019 - August 18, 2019
The Museum of Ventura County's Agricultural Museum, Santa Paula
September 1, 2019 - December 22, 2019
Hi-Desert Nature Museum, Yucca Valley
January 5, 2020 - March 1, 2020
Community Memorial Museum of Sutter County, Yuba City
March 15, 2020 - June 21, 2020
Los Altos History Museum, Los Altos
March 21, 2021 - May 23, 2021
Carnegie Arts Center, Turlock

In Washington’s Fields 
Scheduled exhibition:

February 5, 2020 - July 15, 2020
Washington State History Museum, Tacoma, WA

More Than a Wall - The Social Movements of the Border
Scheduled exhibition:

August 29,, 2020 - November 29,, 2020
San Francisco Public Library
 

In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte
Photographs and text by David Bacon
University of California Press / Colegio de la Frontera Norte
302 photographs, 450pp, 9”x9”
paperback, $34.95 (in the U.S.)

order the book on the UC Press website:
use source code  16M4197  at checkout, receive a 30% discount

En Mexico se puede pedir el libro en el sitio de COLEF:

Los Angeles Times reviews In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte - clickhere
 

En los campos del Norte documenta la vida de trabajadores agrícolas en Estados Unidos -
Entrevista con el Instituto Nacional de la Antropologia y Historia

Entrevista en la television de UNAM

David Bacon comparte su mirada del trabajo agrícola de migrantes mexicanos en el Museo Archivo de la Fotografia

Trabajo agrícola, migración y resistencia cultural: el mosaico de los “Campos del Norte”
Entrevista de David Bacon por Iván Gutiérrez / A los 4 Vientos

"Los fotógrafos tomamos partido"
Entrevista por Melina Balcázar Moreno - Milenio.com Laberinto

Das Leben der Arbeiterschaft auf Ölplattformen des Irak

Die Kunst der Grenze
http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=24304Notruf für "eine andere Welt"

Die Apfel-Pflücker aus dem Yakima-Tal
 

"Documenting the Farm Worker Rebellion"
"The Radical Resistance to Immigration Enforcement"
Havens Center lectures, University of Wisconsin, click here

San Francisco Commonweallth Club presentation by David Bacon and Jose Padilla, clickhere

EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE:  Farm worker photographs on the U.S./Mexico border wall
Entrevista sobre la exhibicion con Alfonso Caraveo (Español)

Cat Brooks interview on KPFA about In the Fields of the North
https://kpfa.org/player/?audio=263826  - Advance the time to 33:15

Book TV: A presentation of the ideas in The Right to Stay Home at the CUNY Graduate Center


Other Books by David Bacon

The Right to Stay Home:  How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration  (Beacon Press, 2013)
Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants  (Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008

Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)

The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004)

En Español: 

EL DERECHO A QUEDARSE EN CASA  (Critica - Planeta de Libros)

HIJOS DE LIBRE COMERCIA (El Viejo Topo)







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