Labor and photography are inseparable. From the muddy newspaper photos of fallen Triangle fire sweatshop workers, to Lewis Hine’s “Icarus” sky boy building the Empire State Building, to Milton Rogovin’s portraits of deindustrialized steelworkers, labor history is partly learned through photographs. In this massive study of the interrelationship of images and farm labor in California, Richard Steven Street excavates a story of struggle, power, endurance, and harsh, dangerous, physical labor. It is a hybrid book—historical, biographical, scholarly, political, critical, technical, multi-disciplinary, and interdisciplinary. Street positions himself among the “three-eye people,” as photographer-historian-activist, both participant and observer. A photographic history of moral inquiry, Street draws from the questioning philosophy of Dorothea Lange: “What drives me to do this hard thing?” (562) The hard thing is returning to the fields year after year to listen, observe, record, and photograph something of the lives connected to the laboring hands and backs that glean the fruits and vegetables we consume. The hard thing is to continue without financial security and without assurance of publication and audience. The hard thing is Street’s scholarly and humanistic long commitment to telling this history. Always, the hard thing is the responsibility of representation without betrayal or exploitation. Street shows the hollowness of an ersatz objectivity and the complexity of conveying subjectivity. He identifies photographers, famous and obscure, who have sustained this hard thing. Through broad strokes and precise details, he demonstrates how photography is a tool in advancing, or a cudgel in thwarting, economically just and physically safe working conditions for farm laborers. The hard thing, ultimately, whether carried out by white or black Okies and Arkies or undocumented Mexicans or Yemeni, is the work in the fields.

Everyone Had Cameras is divided into four historical sections: “Origins and Patterns, 1767–1934”; “The Emergence of the Social Documentary Tradition, 1935–1942”; “The Persistence of Documentary Photography, 1942–1965”; and “Everyone Had Cameras, 1965–2005.” From early images of the pastoral and bucolic to later violent clashes between growers and labor organizers, the common visual thread is the interrelationship of place, labor, ownership, and power. In “Origins and Patterns” Street traces colonialist shapings of the producing land from the mission system to the ranchos. Even the early paintings and drawings are more than seemingly static visual artifacts; Street demonstrates how they speak power relations through the absence (mostly) or presence of representations of field laborers. Their stillness belies the long historical motion of labor from indigenous Indian peonage, to Eadweard Muybridge’s Chinese field hands, to Ken Light’s undocumented workers, trapped and exposed in the trunk of a car on their way to the Promised Land.

Always focused on questions of representation, Street is also a knowledgeable historian of technological change, whether in the relationship of humans to agrarian machinery or the evolution of cameras and the development of film. Opportunities for field worker self-representation emerged by the mid-1850s with the affordable tintype, and more recent digital photography opened spaces for photographers like Pedro Meyer to forgo the decisive moment and deliver complex, ideologically infused visual meanings. Also, Street, as a practicing photographer and a deep scholar, possesses an increasingly rare (academic) epistemology—a visceral knowledge of physical labor. Street sees what other scholars might ignore, such as the back-destroying el cortito (the short one), the short-handled hoe photographed by Leo Hetzel in 1934 that appears again in a comparable image by Paul Fusco in 1968. He traces the deeper origins of the World War II braceros (the arm-men/farm hands), Mexicans who came north to work the fields, by referencing a 1924 panorama by San Antonio photographer Hugo Summerville, and drawing distinctions between those laborers and los enganchados (the hooked ones), those who signed binding field work contracts. Street follows the photographic documentary map from small, no-work-that-will-support-a-family towns south of the U.S. border to the bitter fruit of golden California.

Street practices and identifies a humanist aesthetic that speaks back to postmodern critics who fail to distinguish between the “visual vultures and hit-and-run cowboy journalists” and those many photographers who witness and document multiple truths in the fields and homes of farm laborers. Street declares, “no career-oriented photographer chooses farmworkers as a subject. It is too hard to keep going” (561). Still, there is an ebb and flow of participation by even the most concerned photographers because of the physical difficulties of returning to the fields, the near impossibility of earning a living and finding print-based outlets for their work, and the patient skill it takes to produce aesthetically powerful photographs of the most horrific working conditions. But some did and do. And so there is Victor Aleman’s suppressed photograph of young Felipe Franco, born without arms and legs because his pregnant mother worked the pesticide drenched fields. There is Ernest Lowe’s 1962 photo, “A Day’s Wage,” of a worker holding in his hands a dollar and change and Harvey Richards’s 1959 photograph of the “shape up” for day labor in downtown Stockton. Not satisfied merely to identify photographers, Street also includes the technology of their cameras and films, their relationships with their subjects, and the particular fields and locations they traveled. Part of the dialectic subtext of this history, which includes more than a hundred pages of notes, is how their shooting affected the photographers themselves.

Tracing the evolution of documentary photography even before it had an identifiable name, Street traverses the borders of California to recognize the revolutionary Mexican photography of Italian-born Tina Modotti, the early 1930s cotton field photographs of German émigrés Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel, and the worker-photographer movement in Berlin. He includes such surprising details as the juxtaposition of independently commissioned Ansel Adams photographs of Mexican cotton pickers in the San Joaquin Valley with a field researched article, “Mexicans North of the Rio Grande,” by economist Paul S. Taylor (later Lange’s husband), published in a 1931 Survey Graphic.

Of commanding importance to this history are two figures—Lange and farm workers union leader Cesar Chavez. Street’s insights about struggle enable him to connect enough dots to make palpable the labor of constructing a new documentary photographic tradition and the labor of building and sustaining a union without factory gates or a stable work force—but always with cameras. Knowing and not knowing were pivotal to Chavez and Lange. Chavez, who often used his camera while organizing, thought “photographically” (409), combining brilliant labor strategizing with iconic photo opportunities.

The intellectually inclined Lange respectfully embraced her experiential not-knowing and saw an advantage in being out of her depth, compensating with her careful jottings and attention to voice, especially as paralleling the work of her life partner, Paul S. Taylor. Their collaborative book, An American Exodus, deserves canonical recognition (and a new edition), just as Lange’s great body of work should not be reduced to the highly appropriated “Migrant Mother” (1936). Despite her multiple battles with Roy Stryker and Farm Security Administration control, her physically limiting polio, her balancing act of motherhood and photography, and her bulky equipment, Lange produced photographs that disrupt linear time, encompassing the past, present, and future within the boundaries of a single image. Coupled with Taylor’s research, they produced tangible results—sanitary camps for migrant labor.

Community activist, field worker, husband and father of eight, pacifist, and charismatic leader, Cesar Chavez rightly claims several chapters in Street’s history. Conscious of how growers and police used cameras as surveillance and control, Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and their associates orchestrated pageantry and religious symbols, along with Chavez’s own fasting body, as image methodology to advance their union. And photographers, whether those who marched and traveled with him under the most impoverished conditions, or others, whom Street calls “parachute journalists,” could not resist the compelling photo presence of Chavez.

Street’s beautifully synthesized Everyone Had Cameras is an essential and large history, not just of a particular place, practice, and industry, but also of how American wealth has been built, a rebuttal to the Jeffersonian yeoman ideal and American (especially Cold War) exceptionalism. Occasionally, he overwhelms the reader with too many details or lets slip an overwrought dissertation voice, especially in the introduction. I wish he were more informed about the working-class writers who responded to the conditions in the fields (besides John Steinbeck), such as the Okie poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel and Latina writers Helena Maria Viramontes and Cherrie Moraga, who write compelling narratives and plays about migrant field labor, women, and insecticide poison.

Everyone Had Cameras is an important book that challenges class-biased definitions of beauty, recognizes problems of audience and outlets, and sees the intertwined practice of photography and citizenship. It makes one wish that the hands that hold today’s ubiquitous cameras and upload thousands of images would somehow slow down their solipsistic pursuit long enough to see others’ “hard thing.”