May 11, 2003

UNSEENAMERICA
Photo Project Views Life Through the Lenses of Janitors, Nannies, Clerks

By Nils Kongshaug

And that is what it must have felt like to the day laborer who took the picture, who works long hours in the cold.

That day laborer is one of nearly 2,000 working men and women who are slowly, and with varying degrees of success, being turned into photographers and journalists by a program called "Unseen America."

Janitors, nannies, home health aides, store clerks and garment workers, among others, are given cameras and 12 weeks of instruction in photography and asked to document their lives.

The Undocumented

The project is the brainchild of Esther Cohen, a labor organizer in New York City.

"Most of us don't see the people who work around us, who make the cities work, who make our lives work," she says. "I wanted to figure out a way to do that."

She decided to let workers tell their own stories because nobody else seemed interested in doing it.

"Initially, I would go to each class with a large stack of newspapers and magazines and say to the workers in the class, 'Find yourselves in these publications,'" she says. "In no class were they ever able to do that."

Culture as Important as Food

Cohen is executive director of the nation's only cultural organization run by a union, Bread and Roses, an arm of Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union. As the name suggests, the organization's founding principle is that culture is as important as food to working Americans.

And the workers seem hungry for what she offers, attending photography classes despite, in many cases, holding two jobs and living in parts of town that require long commutes.

The best of their work is mounted periodically in the Bread and Roses gallery in New York, on the union's Web site (viewable here) and at other galleries and universities across the country.

Next week, an exhibit opens in the lobby of the Labor Department in Washington, D.C.