Ken Light and I have been really happy to see our latest book, Valley of Shadows and Dreams, find its way onto the pages of the NY Times Sunday Review, reviewed by Newsweek’s Daily Beast and shown at the Oakland Museum this fall. But, five years ago I would never have imagined this story would grow as it did.
I had been one of those Californians that just drives through the hot, empty Central Valley, which is about the size of Ireland, in order to get to our beautiful mountains. Then, I did research there for another piece of writing about pioneering photojournalist Hansel Mieth for an exhibiton catalogue which required sifting through birth and death records at a county records department deep in this God forsaken, but amazingly productive land. After handling the giant ledgers filled with loopy fountain pen handwriting from the early 20th century, I saw how people had come from all over the world to be a part of the California Dream. I looked through the library’s old newspapers to find information and ended up following the story of the cotton strike near Corcoran in 1933. The fight was bitter, violent and both the growers and pickers went at it in full. When I started my drive back home, I started to really look at what was around me. What I saw were a great number of brand new housing developments going into prime agricultural land. I didn’t know that moment was the peak of a housing boom that would bust within a year and create the worst conditions since that cotton strike in 1933, and for the same reasons. All I knew is that it seemed very strange and that no one seemed to be in charge of managing the need for agricultural land against the need for housing stock right where so much of the country’s food is grown.
Our project started out because of the housing boom, but as we kept asking how and why it was happening, the story kept getting bigger and more complicated. Cause and effect kept turning back on itself and we had to go back and learn a lot of California and labor history, too. We saw a land and people being stripped mercilessly. We saw extreme poverty, a damaged environment and a tsunami of negative social, economic and environmental consequences coming down the pike. In the end, we understood that the problem is that same problem all Americans face now that the curtain has been drawn back after the financial crisis of 2008. The government has been co-opted by special interest groups. Just as in the banking industry, the agricultural industry has put the profit motive before the good of the people and land they manage. All the dynamics of the Depression era cotton strike were still happening, except now we saw the workers are too afraid to stand up for their rights and justice. The saddest aspect is that this was all avoidable. We do not have to be looking at the devestation of the earth and climate change or at a great swath of uneducated, unskilled humanity. That is the most tragic aspect of all.
The journey of creating this book has been very intense. We received one seed grant from a Bay Ares Foundation and the rest of our work was just done on our own. Ken and I traveled together and separately: he to photograph and I to meet with and interview people. We have complimentary skills so most of the time our process works well, but we did have a struggle over our vision for the work. There were many times when Ken would be printing in the darkroom and call me in to see what he was working on and we would end up having a huge discussion about the work, the message, the implied messages, and so on. In fact, at the end, after we had set the images and the text we realized we had to start from scratch to put it all together. So, we used a giant library room at UC Berkeley, where Ken teaches, to lay out all the images and text and spent the day working out the sequencing and the flow of the text. It was our goal to try and balance the weight of the images with the text because the words in this project give the context, the history and our vision for how to rectify these trends.
The book was designed to be the centerpiece of the body of work. It legitimized the work and was an end product to think about while we worked but we planned to get the work out with other media, too. We partnered with the Center for Investigative Reporting to produce a multimedia piece that they could disseminate and that we could use at our lectures and integrate into exhibitions. We have been interviewed on radio stations, have a website and a facebook page as well, but this book has gotten out through word of mouth and direct contacts more than anything else.
The work has been exhibited on both coasts, but actually, my favorite events have been in the valley itself. When we had a talk at Arte Americas in Fresno, we saw a number of people who had been our guides – underpaid community workers who are basically throwing thimbles of water on an immense conflagration of exploitation with their dedication to environmental justice and human rights. When we saw them again after several years at this event we gave them each a book. They were astonished that something had actually come of their work with us. As they turned the pages, I could see they felt seen and their work was validated, perhaps for the first time ever. We are not so naïve that we believe our work and call for a sane and humanist approach to our world will be any more than another thimble of water but if nothing else the people who are working on the front lines have been honored. We do not have the power or dollars of any of the big corporations which are calling the shots in the government and pushing policy and law toward the destruction of the planet at every level. But every fiber of our being cries out that this is insane, it is immoral and it must stop. Our only crazy hope is that if enough individuals agree, then maybe, just maybe, this world will move toward a compassionate, sustainable state.
Melanie Light
Valley of Shadows and Dreams
Text by Melanie Light, Photographs by Ken Light, Foreword by Thomas Steinbeck
Hardcover, 10 x 10″
176 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59714-172-7
$40.00
