David Bacon’s migrant-worker photos on the border wall are part of a long tradition of documentary photography as a tool in social struggle. “They’re a call to action; they’re not just documenting reality,” he told the Tribuno del Pueblo.
He cites an iconic 1930s photograph taken on the San Francisco waterfront showing longshoremen in the daily shape-up, arms outstretched, begging for jobs. “That was the system the union was trying to change.”
Appreciation of such documentary photography is high in Mexico, Bacon says. A show of photographs from the Mexican Revolution is touring the country. Legendary documentary photographer Tina Modotti was a compatriot of activist artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
The Mexicali/Calexico border crossing where his photos are being shown leads into California’s agricultural Imperial Valley, the scene of serious farmworker strikes in the 1930s and again in the 1960s.
Great photographic artists memorialized those struggles, too, from Dorothea Lange’s pictures of migrants in the Great Depression, to George Ballis’s photographs of the United Farm Workers in the 1960s.
The photographs about the wall that are on the wall are particularly meaningful, Bacon says. One of them, showing a young man looking over the wall, accompanied by a dog, resembles a scene in Nahuatl legend about crossing the border into the underworld.
The photographic art memorializes the death of people crossing through the desert, he says.
Bacon has also written a book on the subject, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. But because print outlets for his art are drying up, Bacon uses electronic media for distribution. “The costs are lower, and it’s more open,” he says.” His photographs can be viewed on his Facebook page.
Socially conscious art — “rebellious, insurgent” — goes against the grain of the big art institutions, Bacon says. They favor “post-modernism,” which separates art from reality and the social context in which people live.
Instead, Bacon says, “the vision of artists should be trying to change the world.”
To hear Bacon talk about his work go to, http://vimeo.com/36374689.
