Krist: The dignity of hard labor

Photos, paintings put farmworkers in new light

If the subject of farmworkers comes up during public debate in Ventura County, it's usually during an ideological wrestling match over U.S. immigration policy. Occasionally, the context is affordable housing, labor shortages or wages and working conditions, but that's relatively rare.

It's rarer still to find farmworkers in the middle of a debate about art. Yet, that's what readers of this newspaper have been witnessing over the past week, thanks to coverage of a painting and photography exhibit that opened last month at the John Nichols Gallery in Santa Paula.

It's a welcome turn of events. Thousands of workers toil in local fields, orchards, pastures and packinghouses, and without them, the bucolic landscape that surrounds our cities would not be possible. Yet, their labor is often denigrated or disregarded. To see it become the subject of impassioned debate about dignity and the boundary between exploitation and celebration is refreshing.

Michele Serros kicked off the debate with a letter to the editor last week regarding &quot;Work: The Art of Labor,&quot; an exhibit of photos by Nichols and paintings by local artist Gail Pidduck. All depict workplaces or people on the job, and some of Pidduck's paintings depict farmworkers.

Serros, an Oxnard-born writer who has achieved deserved respect and popularity for her poetry and fiction, suggested that Pidduck had &quot;co-opted&quot; the images of the farmworkers, and had &quot;unintentionally contribute(d) to the continued practice of (their) objectification and exploitation.&quot; She said she sensed &quot;a cultural and spiritual disconnect between artist Pidduck and the subjects in many of her paintings.&quot; And she asked, &quot;What exactly is her work trying to convey?&quot;

It's a fair enough question, one that can productively be asked of any artist &#8212; Serros included. Nichols and several other writers responded in these pages a few days later, eloquently defending Pidduck's work, which they described as a celebration of the dignity and value of those farmworkers and their labor.

My interest in the debate is not purely theoretical. For the past year, I've been working on a book about Ventura County's agricultural industry, based on a series of stories I wrote in 2006 for The Star. In addition to my words, the coffee-table volume includes 92 photographs, 28 of which feature field or packinghouse workers. More than a few of those images resemble Pidduck's paintings.

I cannot speak for Pidduck, but my intent in selecting those photos was to draw attention to the human component of local agriculture, not just the scenic landscapes and colorful crops. Despite their ubiquity &#8212; they outnumber actual farmers roughly 8 to 1 in Ventura County &#8212; farmworkers seem invisible to most people. Prominently displaying images showing them doing important work is a way of forcing readers to acknowledge them. You simply cannot tell the story of farming without telling the story of those whose labor makes it possible.

Do these photos exploit, co-opt and objectify their subjects? I don't think so.

By Serros' logic, any artwork that involves a representation of human beings is guilty of co-opting its subject, an accusation so trite as to be meaningless. And it is no more exploitive for painters and photographers to base their work on people they encounter than it is for a fiction writer to draw on the people she meets to build characters and plots in her novels and short stories. What matters more is intent, and whether or not the work is respectful toward its subject.

Art criticism inevitably reveals as much or more about the critic as it does about the work being evaluated. There is an unavoidable subjectivity to the evaluative process; when we describe our reaction to a particular work, we are engaging in a bit of autobiographical revelation, dropping clues about our own preconceptions and experiences, our insights and our blind spots. So it is not surprising that Serros, whose work so often mines the cultural gap between Anglos and Latinos, would look at paintings of Latino farmworkers by an Anglo artist and see a &quot;cultural and spiritual disconnect&quot; between painter and subject.

There may well be some disconnect between Pidduck and her farmworker subjects. Given their very different backgrounds, it would be remarkable if there were not. But to raise that as a criticism of her work is to imply that artists have no business seeking to bridge that gap, that they should be content to paddle around endlessly in the small cultural and ethnic ponds into which they were born.

That may be safe. But who says art is supposed to be safe?

&#8212; John Krist is a senior editor and Opinion page columnist for The Star. E-mail: To learn more about his forthcoming book about Ventura County agriculture, go to &quot;Work &#8212; The Art of Labor&quot; is on exhibit at John Nichols Gallery, 916 E. Main St., until Dec. 15.