BECOMING A MOVEMENT PHOTOGRAPHER - UCLA Labor Center Interview - Part One Janna Shadduck-Hernandez, project director at the UCLA Labor Center, Interviewed photographer and journalist David Bacon on March 20, 2026, in Fort Bragg, CA https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2026/11/becoming-movement-photographer-ucla.html Read Part Two next week.  An ILWU longshoreman in a demonstration in the Port of Oakland, demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza JANNA SHADDUCK-HERNANDEZ: You've had a lot of people ask you about your labor organizing, but I really want to hear about your story as a photographer and an artist - how you've combined prose and the written word with photography to create a social justice narrative. Could you talk a little about why photography? Why did you choose the visual as a way to talk about the struggles of workers? DAVID BACONs: Photography kind of found me, in a way, as much as I found it. When I was young - a teenager - I was really interested in photography. My parents gave me an old Argus C3 camera, which was an inexpensive but decent 35-millimeter camera for its time. I even learned how to develop film, and then I saved up and saved up and finally bought a single-lens reflex camera, a Miranda - nobody's ever heard of it anymore, but it was pretty common in those days - and I started to get serious about it. Then somebody stole the camera. And that was it for a long, long time - for many years, life went in another direction. But when I was working as an organizer - I spent about twenty-five years working as an organizer, some of it in the factory but mostly on staff - at one point I was working for the Molders Union, foundry workers. We weren't organizing foundries so much, because foundries were busy running away - we were fighting closures all the time - but we were also organizing workers in small factories, mostly in the East Bay and San Francisco, places making things like skateboard parts, or garbage trucks. They were almost all Mexican workers in those years. The Molders Union was for people who basically poured molten metal into sand or plaster molds - an old craft. Going back to the '30s, it was whites-only, especially for journeymen. During World War II, the first Black workers began breaking that color line in the foundry, getting jobs as grinders, and eventually becoming journeyman molders. At one time, our local - Local 164, which was Tom Mooney's local - led the big 1934 march after they killed Nick Bordoise and Howard Sperry during the waterfront strike. Unions in those days had these elaborate embroidered banners, and the banner of our local was at the head of that march, because it was a way of saying, free Tom Mooney, who by then had been in San Quentin prison for almost twenty years. By the time I went to work as an organizer for the local, it was about half Black and half Mexican, and Black workers were journeymen by then. We even had a journeyman Filipino worker who'd learned his trade at Subic Bay in the Philippines. And Mexican workers were coming into the industry - this wasn't unique to foundries, it was happening across all kinds of factories throughout Northern California and the Bay Area. The business agent of our union - the most powerful person in the local - was Ignacio de la Fuente, an immigrant from Mexico City. Nacho got elected business agent, and long before I got there, he'd hired Tom Cseckey as the local's organizer. Tom went on to the janitors' union and became a well-known organizer there. At some point Tom quit, and Nacho hired me. So we began organizing small factories and fighting closures, almost all with Mexican workers. I already knew something about Mexican workers because I'd worked for the farmworkers' union before, and also in Silicon Valley, so I understood what immigration raids were. Nacho and I were pretty good, between the two of us, at understanding what a union had to do to defend workers without papers - how that would become an issue, what to do if the boss made an issue of it, what to do if there was a raid. This was the early 1980s, and we were fighting against the Simpson-Mazzoli bill, which became IRCA, and especially against immigration raids in the workplace. Our local became pretty well known for it. One of the good things Nacho did was partner with MALDEF to sue the INS over its practice of going into a foundry, closing the doors, and going up and down the line demanding everyone's papers. It eventually went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that this wasn't legal - that it was unlawful imprisonment. JANNA: In a way, that had unintended consequences, right? DAVID: Because what the INS did in response was get even more determined to pass the Simpson-Rodino bill, whose main provision was employer sanctions - forcing employers to keep records of people's immigration status, which the INS could then come in and check, and legally do what had been illegal before. So you could argue that if we hadn't won our case, maybe we wouldn't have gotten employer sanctions - JANNA: - which you'd been fighting against for so long. DAVID: Right. We certainly knew what employer sanctions were, that's for sure. I spent the next fifteen, almost twenty years fighting them - and not just fighting them, but fighting to change our labor movement's position on them, because most unions supported them. The AFL supported employer sanctions, and we were saying, no, this is really harmful, because - JANNA: It was bundled with IRCA at the time - they couldn't really decouple the two. DAVID: Well, the progressive argument for IRCA was, it's going to give us amnesty. But the less-spoken argument - and I think much more real in many unions - was, if they can't work, they won't come. In other words, if we make it illegal for people without papers to get a job, by making it illegal for employers to hire them, then immigration will stop and we won't have job competition anymore. Which was a short-sighted idea - that was never going to happen, because the forces behind migration are too powerful to be stopped that way. But it would make people vulnerable. We knew how it would get used against workers in organizing drives - "all of a sudden" the boss would find out someone's papers were in question. This happened to the janitors. I remember once, seven hundred workers lost their jobs in eastern Alameda County because the boss "suddenly discovered" their documentation was in question and demanded they show green cards. When people couldn't, they got fired. Anyway, Nacho and I fought a lot of organizing battles and immigrant-rights battles together, but we weren't always in agreement with each other, and at one point Nacho laid me off. That was all right. I was looking around for work, about to go to work for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers, when People's World asked if I wanted to be their labor writer. They offered practically no money at all, but it sounded exciting, and I was interested in writing - I'd already written a couple things about organizing, even back when I worked for the farmworkers. So I went to work for People's World for about a year. The paper wanted photographs as well as words, so I guess you could say I started writing before I started taking photographs, but the two went together pretty quickly. I remember there was a big restaurant strike - I was taking pictures of Jimmy Herman, head of the ILWU, speaking from a boat at Fisherman's Wharf, part of the protest against those big old restaurants down there. I went back to the paper with the photographs I'd taken, and they were dark, not very good. Alice Sunshine, the editor I worked for, looked at them and said, David, these are terrible, we can't use these. You have to look at the light, David - you have to pay attention to the light. That was my first big lesson in photography, and it's a good one - any good photographer will tell you, that's rule number one. Photographs are made with light. You have to look at the light, at what it's doing. That's what I was using the camera for when Nacho hired me again. I went back to work as an organizer, but with a camera this time. So we would go out on strike. One of our organizing tactics in those years was to try to organize through strikes and avoid elections wherever we could. That usually wasn't hard, because as soon as the boss found out people were organizing, somebody would get fired. I remember organizing a place that made garbage truck bodies in Newark. We'd been talking to the workers, mostly Salvadoran, outside of work. They were angry, because the conditions were terrible. It was a huge sweatshop. We decided to hold a bigger meeting in an empty parking lot about half a mile from the shop. We went there after work, a bunch of workers showed up, and then the boss pulled up in his car and parked a few hundred feet away, watching us. I said: if you don't strike tomorrow, he'll fire a whole shitload of people. What are you going to do? Better to act now than just wait for that to happen. And the workers did decide to strike the next day. That was a model of how we organized, and generally it worked. That strike was pretty hairy, lasted a few weeks, but at the end we got a contract. We got contracts maybe fifty percent of the time, which was better than elections, where it was much easier from a company to defeat the workers. In a strike, even when we didn't win, workers would walk away with a feeling of dignity. They'd fought as hard as they could, and you can't win every fight. It was a good way of organizing. A lot of the pictures I took then were picket-line pictures. I'd bring the camera down to the line and take pictures of people. It was a morale booster, really. We'd joke about it. I'd give people the pictures and say, you're going to take these home and show your family how you stood up, and twenty years from now you'll show your grandkids. We'd all laugh. But it was good for that. And I soon realized I could take them to places like the California AFL-CIO News, and they'd run them. We could use them to ask for strike-support money, and we'd get it. It was a pretty utilitarian way of looking at photography at first. But I started getting interested in the visual side of it for its own sake. What did the photographs actually show? You can imagine the easy shots, people with their signs all in a row. But people are interesting, and if you paid attention, the photographs could be interesting too, especially if you got in close close to people instead of standing twenty feet away. You could see their faces and expressions. On a picket line, in a strike, the expression is usually determination: we're here for as long as it takes. But it wasn't all stock stuff. Once in a while you'd get to photograph the action, though at that point I was usually the one running the picket line, so I didn't have much time to take pictures of it. I remember in that garbage-truck strike, there was a guy on the maintenance crew, a white guy, who kept crossing our line. The workers were furious with him. One day he drove up to the picket line with a can of starter fluid , the stuff you spray into an engine that's hard to start. With his cigarette lighter, he lit it up like a flamethrower, right out of his car window, just to scare people. I thought he was going to blow himself up. Of course that would've made a great picture, but I wasn't thinking about pictures at that point. I was just trying to keep everybody from getting hurt. Because of the demographics of what was going on, I began to realize these photographs were about more than the actual events. They were about this new wave of workers: Mexicans, Salvadorans, Filipinos, coming into the workforce, and how that was changing everything, and what their experience was as a result. We organized another foundry, in Berkeley, which later moved to San Leandro, and got a contract there. When the contract came up for renegotiation, the company had planned to bust us from the beginning. It had hired a lot of Vietnamese workers and, foolishly, put them to work in the foundry for a week before the contract expired. Our members there were mostly Mexican, mostly from Guanajuato, and they didn't speak Vietnamese. The Vietnamese workers didn't speak Spanish, and almost nobody had much English. I don't know how they figured each other out, but when the strike started, the company tried to bus the Vietnamese workers into the plant. Our workers stopped the bus, and the Vietnamese workers got off. I have a picture of the bus being stopped. My sense of timing in that moment wasn't great, because I had two responsibilities at once, and it was hard to just focus on the pictures. But I do have a picture of the workers getting off the bus through the emergency exit at the back. The pictures turned into a project about what happens when people come into this country, into the workforce. They land at the bottom, realize they're at the bottom, get angry about it, and organize. These photographs were about that whole process. Even a single portrait of some guys on a picket line, if you understood the context, was about this larger social phenomenon, not just an isolated event. And that became more and more interesting to me. I was still working as an organizer, and eventually Nacho and I had another disagreement, and I thought that was going to be it. He didn't fire me that time, but I knew we weren't of a single mind about things, so I started thinking I'd better look for another job. I was running a strike, and I asked Katie Quan - I can't remember exactly how I knew Katie - to come down and support us, which she did. When I knew I was going to lose my job, Katie said, would you be interested in coming to work for me? She was the head of the Pacific Northwest District Council of the ILGWU. I said, sure, why not. And that was another whole series of adventures. JANNA: But did she ask you to work with photography, or as an organizer? DAVID: As an organizer - the camera just came along for the ride. At that time Katie wasn't especially interested in photography either; she was interested in organizing the garment industry. But those were also the years when all our shops were running away - half the time I spent as an organizer wasn't organizing new shops, it was fighting closures and trying to get workers whatever we could as the shops ran away. The first thing I remember doing with Katie was organizing picket lines against Koret of California, the big garment company in San Francisco. It was the granddaddy of the garment companies. Everybody from the Fishers to Jessica McClintock had come out of Koret at one time or another. They were the factories with our union contracts, so we went after them. We had a warehouse in Chico, and I had to organize a wildcat there to keep our contract, which eventually led to me losing that job too. JANNA: Right - but there were a couple of things you said: that the photographs often served as a morale booster in moments of struggle, and how workers seeing their own image - and then the humanity of it, as the workforce changed to bring in not just the worker but often the whole family, because you've documented a lot of that, from the '80s and '90s right up to today, bringing in the families. Maybe you could talk about that evolution - from documenting the event to this new phase of using the visual to bring in more of a social-justice-unionism perspective. I know it's not a single moment, there's an evolution - but you mentioned it started as a morale booster, and then you realized you wanted to tell a deeper story. DAVID: When you say social justice unionism, I think it's important to be clear about what we're talking about, because I came into the labor movement already politicized to a degree. I'd joined my first union and gotten fired from my first job some years before. I'd also gone to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, and came back thinking, there's a worldwide revolutionary movement going on, and I need to find my place in it. In the United States that was harder, in some ways, than elsewhere. In Nicaragua you'd go join the Sandinistas, in El Salvador you'd join the FMLN and go up to the mountains to fight. In the United States, that's not what resistance and social change means. This was 1975, and one of the big things happening was the farmworkers' movement, and I thought: this is a place where I can see how a social movement for socialism, for real change in this country, is going to take place. I talked my way onto the legal staff in Santa Maria and Oxnard, because I knew the lawyers there, and went to work. Once my Spanish got good enough, I became an organizer instead of a legal worker - I was never that interested in the law. But it did teach me something. My job was taking statements from workers who'd been fired, which turned out to be good practice in interviewing people. I didn't speak Spanish when I came into the union, so I had to grab another organizer and get them to translate for me. You can imagine how reluctant organizers were to waste their time on that, so I had to learn fast. Eventually I got good enough with broken Spanish to be an organizer. In that process I became even more political, because I was learning everything. I didn't know anything about rural California, or about Mexicans, or about Mexico. I was learning about class struggle in the fields, and it was the workers, and the experience of working for the union, that was teaching me. That politicized me even further, and I joined the Communist Party. One of the things that really did was make me read, and talk to people who'd lived through the '30s - who'd taken part in the San Francisco general strike, or organized the CIO unions. My own parents had been in CIO unions. My dad got blacklisted, which is how we ended up in California. So social justice unionism meant organizing unions that were democratic, that were militant, that would fight the boss for what workers needed, and that workers themselves would run and where they'd make the decisions. Unions could be schools where people would learn about social change and fight for broader goals than just a contract, the broadest goal being that eventually we'd run society as a whole. We're socialists; we don't want capitalists anymore, we don't want people profiting off our labor. That's what social justice unionism meant to me. Obviously that's not the guiding philosophy of the unions we actually have, so all the time I spent as an organizer, I was trying to balance these things. How much can you push for, when you also have a job to do? At one point, when I was working for the farmworkers, I got into a big fight with Arturo Rodriguez and Marshall Ganz, and they sent me to a non-existent assignment in La Paz - basically trying to get rid of me. I went and got myself a job in the garage there, fixing cars for a while. Finally I went back to Coachella and asked Eliseo Medina, who I'd worked for before, if he'd give me a job back as an organizer. Eliseo said, look, David, we all have our political ideas, but here in the union, we're here for one thing, and that's to organize the union. If you're okay with that, you can come back to work. I said, of course I'm okay with that - that's exactly what we're here to do. So I went back to work. But before I'd even gone to work for the union, coming back from Cuba, my flight landed in New York, and I needed somewhere to stay before I could get a bus back to California. I'd been working on the farmworker boycott in Oakland, and I knew Lori Huerta, Dolores's older daughter, and she was at the boycott house in New York. I called her and asked if I could crash on the floor for a night or two. She said sure, come on over. When I got there, Dolores Huerta and Richard Chavez were both at the house. We all went out for pizza, and I spent the whole dinner telling them about the wonders of Cuba. Dolores and Richard were very nice about it - probably raising their eyebrows internally at my enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution - but they were kind. JANNA: That was '75? DAVID: Seventy-five. Then, not too long after, when I went to work for the union, you got given a place to live - a bedroom in an apartment with the other organizers. I went to work in Oxnard and got my room, and I put up this bandana I'd gotten in Cuba with a Cuban flag on it. Tina Solinas came into the room and said, David, you have to watch it here - this is going to get you in trouble. There wasn't a lot of tolerance for leftism - the phrase used in the union was "the hidden agenda," meaning people with socialist politics. You always had to balance that. When I was working in Coachella for the union, Olga Talamante had been captured and held in Argentina during the time of the generals. There was a big campaign, which I was peripherally connected to through other UFW friends, to get her out of prison and out of the country. When she was freed and back in the U.S. we organized a speaking tour for her. I set it up for her to come speak at a couple of union offices, including Coachella. Afterward, someone took me aside and said, David, you can't do this - this isn't the union's agenda. Olga Talamante might be a good person, but what happened in Argentina isn't our business here. Those were pretty clear examples. But in every union I worked for, there was always a question of how much social justice you were going to fight for, and how. Standing on a soapbox making speeches to workers about the wonders of socialism, or how life was different in Cuba or the Soviet Union, wasn't an effective way of convincing anybody of anything. But on the other hand, just doing your job and fighting for as good a contract as you could get wasn't enough either. How do we make further progress if we just stop there? That was part of the problem with Nacho too, though less about that than about how to have a democratic union. Fighting for union democracy is dangerous if you're on staff, because you can get fired so easily. JANNA: And people in power want to hold onto it, and make sure that they sleep well. DAVID: For young people thinking about going to work on union staff, my big piece of advice has always been, don't fall in love with your job. At some point you're going to have to choose between what you think is right, or how you think politics should be done, and what's going to be viewed as a problem by the people who have power over you. And you'll have to choose. JANNA: Do you think - because of your understanding of how unions worked, and still work, and your experience across many different kinds of workers, farmworkers to factory workers to garment to industrial manufacturing - that gave you a kind of credibility to move into these other worlds, to become a journalist or photographer respected in those fields? I know a bit of your story, I've read your work - but also holding onto those values where, myself included, we really questioned unions: okay, we talk about social-movement unionism, social justice unionism, but what are we really doing around housing, around immigration, around Black-and-brown struggle? How are we actually doing that? A lot of the time it gets shut down. I find it fascinating how you've pivoted into spaces that can tell these stories in different ways, while staying deeply connected to the labor movement - moving between the visual and the written word. I remember you talking about your first editor telling you your pictures were terrible, and then, look at the light - I love that, pay attention to the light. It's a beautiful metaphor for so many things. But maybe talk a bit more about how you took that deep political commitment, that thinking about socialism, and moved it into this world of writing and photography. DAVID: I think moving into the world of writing and photography took a certain amount of time - five or six years at least, for a lot of reasons, money being one of them. I couldn't make a living that way at first. Fortunately I was married to somebody who was the director of a social service agency, Filipino Advocates for Justice - Lillian - who got a regular paycheck. That gave me a freedom I wouldn't otherwise have had, because I kept losing jobs. I'd try to work on the photography and writing, and the bank account would start going down. Lillian was one of those people who never paid herself enough, so it didn't cover everything. And I had two other daughters, and then with Lillian, a third, so family expenses were considerable. It took a while before I could make enough to stop working for unions. So what would happen is, I'd go to work for Nacho, lose that job, go to work for Katie, lose that job, go to work for Rose Ann DeMoro with the nurses, or for SEIU Local 790 - Josie Mooney - or the CWA. I went through a number of union jobs. People would hire me to run a campaign. When the workers at La Conexión Familiar, a Sprint boiler room in San Francisco, organized, Sprint just closed the whole operation and everybody lost their jobs. We ran a campaign around that, and I got hired to run it because I knew how, and I spoke Spanish, and I knew the workers' culture. That's how I made a living. But at the same time I'd write about it, and by then I was developing as a photographer, taking some pretty interesting photographs of the workers and what they were doing. These things were happening simultaneously. And what it also meant, given where I was coming from, was that I was carrying that labor, worker-centered perspective into the photography and writing, trying to make it make sense to me as a labor activist. To this day, I belong to the News Guild. I was the co-chair of our local's freelance unit for fifteen years, and I'm still active in the union, because it's built into my bones. "The Military Response to Sanctuary Cities and Immigrants' Right to Work Letters and Politics: Mitch Jeserich interviews David Bacon: KPFA, June 10, 2025 https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-june-10-2025/  Immigrant Workers and the Recent History of Immigration Raids A presentation by David Bacon at the UCLA Latin American Institute, with photographs and transcript. 3/11/25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FlsyWTBWs BOOKS - LIBROS More Than a Wall / Mas que un muro El Colegio de la Frontera Norte https://david-bacon-photography.square.site/product/more-than-a-wall-mas-que-un-muro/1?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false En Mexico: https://libreria.colef.mx/detalle.aspx?id=7864 In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte University of California Press / Colegio de la Frontera Norte https://www.ucpress.edu/books/in-the-fields-of-the-north-en-los-campos-del-norte/paper En Mexico: https://libreria.colef.mx/detalle.aspx?id=7586 The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration (Beacon Press, 2013) WORK AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: The David Bacon Archive exhibition at Stanford Libraries https://exhibits.stanford.edu/bacon/browse For a catalog: (https://web.stanford.edu/dept/spec_coll/NonVendorPubOrderform2017.pdf) THE REALITY CHECK - David Bacon blog https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums MAS QUE UN MURO Cinco Entrivistas sobre la exposicion en el Museo Nacional de las Culturas del Mundo, CDMX: Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eix0HEStpc Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO4IIBPs06U Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHtY-fgtsjs Part 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm_MNrEX2Mw Part 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpwSuBbgAQs
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