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Taking a view of unseen lives

A new book details the experiences of immigrant workers as it tries to paint more rounded picture

BY MELISSA MANSFIELD | Newsday Albany Bureau

May 15, 2006

TROY - A couple dances in a kitchen, the man twirling the woman, who beams at him. A woman in a checkered apron hands down a foam cup while standing in a truck bed, the sun high above her. A man with mud-caked pants collects hay and glances backward, exposing his baseball cap underneath a hooded sweatshirt and a tired look on his face.

These photos were taken by day laborers at The Workplace Project, a nonprofit organization in Hempstead. The low-wage Latino workers were given cameras and asked to document their daily lives. These photos, and another 137 from across the country, have been collected in a new book, "Unseen America: Photos and Stories by Workers," to be released today.

The photos were chosen from thousands to "express that workers are more than the work they do," said Zoeann Murphy, regional coordinator for unseenamericaNYS, which is publishing the book, a collaboration of the Bread and Roses Cultural Project of 1199/SEIU, the New York State AFL-CIO and the Workforce Development Institute.

Under each image, photographers share what the pictures mean to them. Luis Bernal, who captured the dancing couple, wrote, "This is a picture that would help everyone else know that we come to this country not to do bad things like people say. We come here to work and have fun."

Nadia Marin-Molina, executive director of The Workplace Project, said, "We had thought that a lot of the pictures would be about conflict, because that's what we saw." Regular protests had been occurring against day workers in Farmingville at that time. Instead, "most of the pictures that people took were of their families and kids, different scenes. It was a much more rounded view of life."

Other photographs show hope and dreams. Ying Li took a photo of a plane's jet stream framed by tree branches. The garment worker wrote, "I was hoping that someone would write my name in the sky."

Another photo shows a building maintenance worker writing out a work order in a lobby. "There's a whole second part, a second soul to everybody here that nobody seems to know about," explained the photographer, Samuel Conteras. Two untitled photographs show the vast realities within just a few blocks of New York City. Maria LaGuardia, a dental assistant at Rikers Island, captured a homeless man, bundled in a wool blanket, with a sign reading, "Please help. God bless you." On the opposite page, Barbara Fu, a bill processor, documented a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park.

So far, 350 photography projects organized by unseenamerica have taken place with various groups.

Kenny Shane, a building supervisor, took a close-up of pipes in shadows. "Everybody has a creative side," he said. "It is just a question of giving them the tools to express themselves."

For more information, go to www.bread-and-roses.com.