Harvesting cabbage: bend over, cut, stand up and toss. Bend over, cut, stand up and toss. These heads will be trimmed, washed, and sent to market.
Craig J. Barber is a NW based photographer documenting farmers and their work–growing our food.
For over 30 years he has focused on the cultural landscape in rapid transition, some fading from memory. Barber works with both contemporary and antiquarian processes. His work has explored Viet Nam, Havana, Tuscany, farmers in the Finger Lakes and Catskill Mountain regions of New York State and now Skagit Valley in Washington State.
Barber has been awarded grants and residencies from the New York Foundation of the Arts, the MacDowell Fellowship, Seattle Arts Commission, Polaroid Corporation, Glacier National Park Residency, LIght Work, Syracuse, NY, the Saltonstall Foundation, Ithaca, NY, Washington State Arts Commission, and the Puffin Foundation.
His work is represented in over 50 public and private collections including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Chrysler Museum, Center for Photography Woodstock, George Eastman Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Art, Houston, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England, among others.
Statement: Over the past 4 years I have documented agriculture by photographing both the fruits and the labors of feeding humanity. The project, FarmHands, FarmLand (working title), is a portrait of food production on small farms in the early 21st century in North America. While my project focuses on a small region, Skagit River Valley Washington, the tasks of farmers are universal. This powerful imagery, accompanied with oral histories, will introduce the lives of farmers and farmer workers as they face their endless cycle of tasks: planting and cultivating, irrigating and harvesting, livestock care and management. Year after year. To feed people.
