“THE MIGRANT PROJECT: Contemporary California Farm Workers” photographs by  Rick Nahmias

“The Migrant Project” is an in-depth black and white photojournalistic mosaic detailing the daily lives and struggles of today’s California migrant farm workers.  It was shot in over forty towns spanning the state, from Calexico to Sacramento, by photographer, writer and filmmaker, Rick Nahmias during the 2002-3 harvests.

Though the WPA’s images of the farm workers of the 1930’s and 40’s are now iconic to many Americans, this survey aims to capture the rarely seen contemporary faces and personal struggles of this mostly invisible and cast-off population.  It is the goal of this project to depict the farm worker’s multi-dimensional existence from family life to their search for housing, work, health care and the scraping together of community. By providing the viewer with these and other human details it will hopefully help foster a greater sense of identification with the subject as well as clearer, more urgent and personal face to this, the poorest and most consistently exploited segment of our society.

Over the course of six months during the summer and fall of 2002 and winter of 2003, Nahmias traveled up and down the state of California to dozens of migrant and farm communities photographing the people and recording their stories.  The resulting 40 image exhibit and essay premiered in Los Angeles as an affiliate exhibit to the California Council for the Humanities Reading “The Grapes of Wrath” Program, and has received a congressional citation from Representative Loretta Sanchez.  With seed grants from California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc., The Center for Latino Policy Research and The Kurz Family Foundation, the exhibit is now touring North America as an art and educational tool. 

Rick Nahmias, an immigrant to California himself, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He is blending his lifelong interests in the arts and social justice with this project.