A Civil Rights Photographer, and a Struggle, Are Remembered

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Jon Lewis shot thousands of archetypical civil rights photographs in the late 1960s: a picket line snaking along the horizon, children playing in squalor, activists huddled in a strategy session. What makes these photographs different is their location and the subjects. Taken in central California and not in the Jim Crow South, they depict farm laborers of Mexican and Filipino descent, the vanguard of the historic Delano grape strike.

Photographers had been documenting farmworkers since the 1850s, as Richard Steven Street, who teaches American studies at Princeton University, notes in his new book, “Jon Lewis: Photographs of the California Grape Strike” (University of Nebraska Press). But Mr. Lewis was the first to document, in its totality, a farm labor strike.

Mr. Lewis, who died virtually unknown in 2009 at the age of 71, engaged the farmworker movement both as chronicler and active participant in some of its marches and meetings. Precise and carefully studied, his photographs exposed the harrowing back story of the fruits and vegetables that Americans consumed daily without hesitation or thought. They made real “the human price paid by a transnational class of landless peasants, excluded from the social and legal privileges enjoyed by most Americans,” Mr. Street writes. But they also revealed a wholesome and self-motivated community: farmworkers enjoying actos, the one-act political plays of Luís Valdéz’s El Teatro Campesino, for example, or strikers engaging in the family life or religious rituals that gave them the strength to endure.

A Marine Corps veteran and military photographer who studied photojournalism in college and graduate school, Mr. Lewis arrived in Delano in January 1966, intending to stay briefly. He remained on and off until 1970, when the striking farmworkers signed union contracts with the California grape industry.

Jon Lewis, courtesy of University of Nebraska Press As Mr. Lewis describes this self-portrait in his book, “The hot-shot-to-trot Tri-X kid-chronicler gets artsy-fartsy, circa March 30, 1966.”

Conditions for farm laborers were dire. Growers routinely ignored state labor laws. Wages were below the poverty level. Work was backbreaking. Laborers were sickened by pesticides. They lived in derelict labor camps, in unheated shacks without indoor plumbing. Child labor was rampant. Life expectancy was 20 years below the national average.

In September 1965, advocacy groups joined together to organize a strike against growers, which eventually included a national boycott of table grapes. Six months later, the Mexican-American farm labor activist César Chávez led a 300-mile pilgrimage from Delano to Sacramento in an attempt to compel growers and the state to address the grievances of farmworkers and to bring public attention to their cause.

Mr. Chávez, a founder of the United Farm Workers and the union’s most prominent advocate, could rely on Mr. Lewis, the son of struggling Nebraska corn farmers, for compelling, useful and ultimately influential images. Such photographs demonstrated the plight of the farmworker without resorting to the kind of photographic clichés â€" the stoic laborer as a symbol of a nation’s indomitable spirit, for example â€" that would have detracted from the troubling reality of their situation.

Mr. Lewis’s imagery falls principally into two categories: long establishing shots that provide an overview of his subjects’ lives and nuanced portraits. The former include a haunting picture of a stooped worker, a tiny figure engulfed by a massive field of lettuce (Slide 15); a striker waving a sign at workers taking a break, admonishing them to join; and workers kneeling in front of a makeshift shrine set up in a battered Mercury station wagon.

Jon Lewis, courtesy of University of Nebraska Press Sons of farmworkers during the DiGiorgio rally in Delano, Calif. Summer 1966.

The portraits are equally compelling: a pensive Chávez, shot from below (below), the United Farm Workers thunderbird logo soaring above him; an aging worker carrying a massive crate of grapes on his shoulder (Slide 12); children listening in rapt attention to speakers at a rally (above); a lyrical photograph of a strike supporter, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, his face dramatically lit by television lights (Slide 14).

The book’s other significant revelation, beyond the photographs, concerns Mr. Chávez’s confidence in the ability of pictures to move a skeptical or indifferent nation. “We took every photograph of violence and used it to publicize what they were doing to us,” Mr. Chávez later recalled. “We wanted those and other images to be seen by the public.”

Mr. Lewis provided Mr. Chávez with a powerful arsenal of images. He endured the wrath of growers, professional isolation and indigence to create, as Mr. Street writes, “an extraordinarily intimate and comprehensive photographic record not only of César Chávez but also of field hands, activists, clergy, nuns, radicals, Mexicans, Anglos, Filipinos, politicians, actors and professional activists who forged the modern farmworker movement.” In the process, he amassed a commanding and eloquent body of work â€" culminating in an elegiac book, “From This Earth,” self-published in 1969 â€" that helps restore to history the details of a consequential, but less remembered, struggle for equality and freedom.

Like Malcolm X, who mastered both photography and the media in the service of the Nation of Islam, Mr. Chávez carried a camera to document the strike. And like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he engineered the kinds of events and images that he believed could alter public opinion, from those that emphasized religious symbols and ritual affirming farmworkers’ faith and commitment to nonviolence to shots of arrests and harassment, some strategically provoked when photojournalists were present.

As Mr. Lewis recalls in the book, Mr. Chávez’s trust in photography was inspired by the African-American civil rights movement. He proposed a cross-country pilgrimage based on the bloody 1965 Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama, for example, because it generated media images, both still and televised, that transformed public opinion.

“People don’t understand how attuned he was to the civil rights movement,” Mr. Lewis said of Mr. Chávez. “He thought that he could rekindle interest, generate new imagery, and create what amounted to a massive photo opportunity that projected the kind of picture that he wanted the public to see.”

Jon Lewis, courtesy of University of Nebraska Press At a dedication on the site of Forty Acres, Calif., where the United Farm Workers would establish a headquarters, César Chávez wore a white Filipino wedding shirt, which he wore on special occasions. A majority of grape workers were Filipino. Spring 1967.

Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York.

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