Collection of amateur photography gives visibility to lives of the working class

By MARCUS FRANKLIN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
"Unseen America: Photos and Stories by Workers" edited by Esther Cohen (ReganBooks, 224 pp, $39.95 hardcover)
NEW YORK (AP) -- In one photo, a fluffy cat sits in front of a sunny window looking heavenward.
In another, a dancing couple is captured mid-twirl, the woman smiling broadly. In yet another, a woman kneads dough in a pan.
"I not only see the food, but also the soft, gentle hands that have always cared for me and my siblings," Valentina Paljusaj wrote about the photo she snapped of her mother, who was born in Yugoslavia.
In late 2001, hundreds of often immigrant workers began taking free photography lessons. Then they picked up point-and-shoot cameras, donated by the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and began documenting their lives.
Four years later, the photographs are showcased in a new book, "Unseen America: Photos and Stories by Workers."
Visual testimony
On Monday, nearly 700 people attended the book's launch party at the Guggenheim Museum.
Kivin Bauzo, a mental health care worker from Cleveland, told the crowd how he had received an e-mail about learning photography for free. His photograph of a boy sitting on a bicycle outside a Cleveland barbershop takes up two pages.
"'Unseen America' gave me the opportunity to explore a talent I didn't know I had," said Bauzo, 35, who has been featured in Smithsonian magazine and hopes to set up a solo exhibit in Cleveland.
Jane Friedman, president and CEO of HarperCollins, called the book "a stirring visual testimony."
"We depend on them for so much but we rarely have an opportunity to see inside their world," she said.
People at work
The black and white images in the 224-page coffee table book are often poignant, stark and honest. The amateur photographers capture the people around them: relatives, friends, co-workers, even strangers, and their worlds spring to life for the viewer. A few lines of text accompanies the photos.
There's the unidentified woman who makes skirts and pants. She sits at a sewing machine having lunch. "Most of us eat our lunch at our workstations," wrote Bonny Leung, a seamstress who took the photo of her co-worker in New York.
"The majority of the workers in the book are invisible and a lot of the occupations are invisible," said Kenneth Shane, whose photo of a doorman at the Manhattan condo where he supervises staff and building operations appears in "Unseen America."
The book is divided into four sections: work, leisure, community and family.
Other photographs in the "work" section, the first, show people cleaning mall bathrooms, hauling boxed apples on a snow-swept sidewalk and mopping lobby floors.
Leisure life
In the second section -- "leisure" -- there's the merry dancing couple and Long Island day laborers from Mexico.
"They wanted to show that their lives also have a dimension of joy," said Esther Cohen, executive director of Bread and Roses, the nonprofit cultural arm of Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union. Cohen edited "Unseen America."
There are photographs of workers cooking at home, being baptized and worshipping.
Arthur Deavers, a Brooklyn pharmacy technician, photographed saxophonist Dewey Redman, whom he met when the musician came into the store to have a prescription filled. Deavers, an avid jazz fan, and Redman, a prostate cancer survivor, struck up a conversation that continued outside the store. Deavers said he took the photo as an expression of hope.
"It shows a person that's still strong in his determination," Deavers said of the photo, in which Redman plays his sax.
Community and family
The "community" section shows the churches, Chinese parades, neighborhoods as well the homeless and abandoned plants.
Not all of the "Unseen" are immigrants: Travis Nelson, Valerie Pourier and Wade Broken Nose depict North Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation with angry clouds, an abandoned church, a landscape, a teepee and a simple, beloved house.
"Family" celebrates a single dad, a son getting his hair cut in a barber shop and a young daughter at home, cleaning a glass top table with Windex.
Community centers, union halls, schools and the U.S. Department of Labor have displayed the photos.
The launch kicked off exhibits and parties in Dallas, Cleveland, Chicago and Washington and coincided with Monday's "A Day Without Immigrants," when organizers asked immigrants to skip work, school and shopping to show their impact on the U.S. economy.
On the Net: www.bread-and-roses.com/unseenintro.html
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