THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT PHOTOGRAPHY OF DAVID BACON: WORKING CLASS LIFE ON IRAQ'S OIL RIGS
Photographs and text by David Bacon The Progressive, 5/27/19 https://progressive.org/dispatches/the-social-movement-photography-of-david-bacon-part-two-190527/ https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-social-movement-photography-of_27.html  Editor’s note: These photographs, shown in the halls of California oil workers and longshoremen, revealed to them how their counterparts in Iraq were treated, often by the same oil monopolies. We’re delighted to share the second of a multi-part series from the archives of photographer David Bacon. A former union organizer, Bacon’s thirty years of photographs and writing capture the courage of people struggling for social and economic justice in countries around the world. His images are now part of Special Collections in Stanford University’s Green Library. Part Two tells of his visit to the oil fields of post-war Iraq and what the refinery workers told him about how they forced Halliburton out of Basra—one of the first big victories of the time for Iraqi unions. As millions of people marched against the invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s, many carried signs pointing an accusing finger at Dick Cheney and Halliburton - "No Blood for Oil!" But seeing that oil was a motivating factor for the war did not necessarily mean that people understood much about Iraq as a country, the role oil plays in its national life, or about the workers who pump it from the ground and refine it. In 2013 I went to Baghdad with a longshore union leader, Clarence Thomas, to learn how the occupation was affecting Iraq's workers and unions. I documented factory life, and took photographs and talked with workers in the Daura oil refinery. There I began to see oil's central role in Iraq's life. I realized that further documentation meant going to southern Iraq, where most of the industry is located. A year after returning from Baghdad I met oil workers in London, and Hassan Juma'a, president of their newly-reorganized union, asked me to come to Basra. With the help of Ewa Jasciewicz, in 2015 I arrived with several British activists, there to attend a conference organized by the union to oppose handing over the country's oil industry to the giant oil monopolies. In Basra workers told me that in the occupation's first year, Halliburton, the company formerly headed by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, had been given a contract to take over all the financial operations of the civil administration in the south, including paying the wages of oil workers. If you worked on a rig or in the refinery, you had to hand in your time sheet at the Halliburton office to get paid. Yet people in the U.S. and Europe were generally unaware of this corruption, and knew almost nothing about the workers who make the oil industry function. I went to Basra determined to take photographs and record interviews that would pierce this invisibility. I wanted to give unions and workers in the U.S. a sense of who their brothers and sisters were, and how they were affected by the occupation. Originally organized under the British in the early 1920s, the oil union was always the heart of the country's labor movement. Iraq's two biggest strikes, in 1946 and 1952, were organized by oil workers, and helped build the movement for Iraq's social revolution in 1958. The reorganization of the oil union in Iraq is a heroic story, one that we told in The Progressive in an article I wrote after my return: https://progressive.org/magazine/iraqi-unions-defy-privatization/ In that article I recounted what the refinery workers told me they did to get rid of Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR. At the Basra refinery a small group took a crane out to the gate, and lowered it across the road. Behind it, dozens of tanker trucks began stacking up, unable to leave with their loads of oil and gasoline. Sonn a heavily armed military escort pulled up to get Halliburton's oil moving again. "At first there were only 100 of us, but workers began coming out," I was told by Faraj Arbat, one of the plant's firemen. "Some took their shirts off and told the troops, 'Shoot us.' Others lay down on the ground." Ten of them even went under the tankers, brandishing cigarette lighters. They announced that if the soldiers fired, they would set the tankers alight. The soldiers did not fire. Instead, by the end of the day, the workers had been paid the wages Halliburton had been withholding. Within a week, everyone at the refinery had joined, and. the oil union in Basra had been reborn. Finally, oil workers took action to stop Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR from raking off profits from their wages. They stopped work. Three days of paralysis in the oil fields was enough to force Halliburton out of Basra - one of the first big victories of Iraqi unions. |
[. . .]
To see the complete set of images, click here.
Read the first installment in this series here.
Exhibition Schedule
Exhibitions of photographs are scheduled for the following venues and dates:
In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte
Scheduled exhibitions:
Read the first installment in this series here.
Exhibition Schedule
Exhibitions of photographs are scheduled for the following venues and dates:
In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte
Scheduled exhibitions:
June 16, 2019 - August 18, 2019
The Museum of Ventura County's Agricultural Museum, Santa Paula
September 1, 2019 - December 22, 2019
Hi-Desert Nature Museum, Yucca Valley
January 5, 2020 - March 1, 2020
Community Memorial Museum of Sutter County, Yuba City
March 21, 2021 - May 23, 2021
Carnegie Arts Center, Turlock
In Washington’s Fields
Scheduled exhibition:
February 5, 2020 - July 15, 2020
Washington State Historical Museum, Tacoma, WA
More Than a Wall - The Social Movements of the Border
Scheduled exhibition:
August 29,, 2020 - November 29,, 2020
San Francisco Public Library
In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte
Photographs and text by David Bacon
University of California Press / Colegio de la Frontera Norte
302 photographs, 450pp, 9”x9”
paperback, $34.95 (in the U.S.)
order the book on the UC Press website:
ucpress.edu/9780520296077
use source code 16M4197 at checkout, receive a 30% discount
En Mexico se puede pedir el libro en el sitio de COLEF:
https://www.colef.mx
Los Angeles Times reviews In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte - clickhere
En los campos del Norte documenta la vida de trabajadores agrícolas en Estados Unidos -
Entrevista con el Instituto Nacional de la Antropologia y Historia
http://www.inah.gob.mx/es/boletines/6863-en-los-campos-del-norte-documenta-la-vida-de-trabajadores-agricolas-en-estados-unidos
Entrevista en la television de UNAM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdSaBKZ_k0o
David Bacon comparte su mirada del trabajo agrícola de migrantes mexicanos en el Museo Archivo de la Fotografia
http://www.cultura.cdmx.gob.mx/comunicacion/nota/0038-18
Trabajo agrícola, migración y resistencia cultural: el mosaico de los “Campos del Norte”
Entrevista de David Bacon por Iván Gutiérrez / A los 4 Vientos
http://www.4vientos.net/2017/10/04/trabajo-agricola-migracion-y-resistencia-cultural-el-mosaico-de-los-campos-del-norte/
"Los fotógrafos tomamos partido"
Entrevista por Melina Balcázar Moreno - Milenio.com Laberinto
http://www.milenio.com/cultura/laberinto/david_baconm-fotografia-melina_balcazar-laberinto-milenio_0_959904035.html
Die Kunst der Grenze
http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=24304Notruf für "eine andere Welt"
http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=24087
Die Apfel-Pflücker aus dem Yakima-Tal
http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=23990
"Documenting the Farm Worker Rebellion"
"The Radical Resistance to Immigration Enforcement"
Havens Center lectures, University of Wisconsin, click here
San Francisco Commonweallth Club presentation by David Bacon and Jose Padilla, clickhere
EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE: Farm worker photographs on the U.S./Mexico border wall
http://us7.campaign-archive2.com/?u=fc67a76dbb9c31aaee896aff7&id=0644c65ae5&e=dde0321ee7
Entrevista sobre la exhibicion con Alfonso Caraveo (Español)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJeE1NO4c_M&feature=youtu.beTHE REALITY CHECK - David Bacon blog
http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com
Cat Brooks interview on KPFA about In the Fields of the North
https://kpfa.org/player/?audio=263826 - Advance the time to 33:15
Book TV: A presentation of the ideas in The Right to Stay Home at the CUNY Graduate Center
http://booktv.org/Watch/14961/The+Right+to+Stay+Home+How+US+Policy+Drives+Mexican+Migration.aspx
Other Books by David Bacon
The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration (Beacon Press, 2013)
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2328
Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/Illegal-People-P780.aspx
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100558350
The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520244726
En Español:
EL DERECHO A QUEDARSE EN CASA (Critica - Planeta de Libros)
http://www.planetadelibros.com.mx/el-derecho-a-quedarse-en-casa-libro-205607.html
HIJOS DE LIBRE COMERCIA (El Viejo Topo)
http://www.tienda.elviejotopo.com/prestashop/capitalismo/1080-hijos-del-libre-comercio-deslocalizaciones-y-precariedad-9788496356368.html?search_query=david+bacon&results=1
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org and http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com
and https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/Illegal-People-P780.aspx
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100558350
The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520244726
En Español:
EL DERECHO A QUEDARSE EN CASA (Critica - Planeta de Libros)
http://www.planetadelibros.com.mx/el-derecho-a-quedarse-en-casa-libro-205607.html
HIJOS DE LIBRE COMERCIA (El Viejo Topo)
http://www.tienda.elviejotopo.com/prestashop/capitalismo/1080-hijos-del-libre-comercio-deslocalizaciones-y-precariedad-9788496356368.html?search_query=david+bacon&results=1
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org and http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com
and https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums
